The Man Who Was Mr Sark
by directdial
Summary: COMPLETED You know Sark’s a twisted, manipulative devil, but you don’t care because you’re already a slave to him anyway? – and besides, you know he’s capable of redemption! Some swearing and sexual references.
1. Default Chapter

**Chapter 1: Spada Da Marra** **- **a practice rapier, but one 'untipped' and so still capable of inflicting a wound.

(The chapter titles were sword-fencing terms used during the Renaissance. They are taken from the website for ARMA, The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts.)

At the _Alias_ London Con of August 2004, when asked which song encapsulated Mr. Sark David Anders replied: _Creep_, by Radiohead.

He then began to quietly sing the chorus.

_The story begins over 15 years ago …_

He knew today was a special day, it was his birthday - his sixth birthday – although no-one ever said. His birthday went unmarked at the Academy, no-one's birthday was acknowledged at the Academy, but today was still a special day though, even here, because it was Christmas Day too.

All the boys liked Christmas Day, it was the one day of the year that was different, and you could ask for a present too, and if you asked for something you were allowed to have, you got it.

He hadn't had a present since arriving aged 4, he'd been asking for the wrong thing, he'd been asking for a pet.

Before the Academy he'd had a dog. He'd asked for one for his first Christmas, but he'd been given nothing. Next time round he wondered if maybe they didn't want you to have a dog because dogs left a mess, they walked around and disturbed things, but … maybe something that would stay quiet and tidy and obedient in it's cage, maybe a guinneapig? No, he hadn't gotten a present then either.

Without a dog, or even a guinneapig, the little boy had started keeping back crumbs from the meals he and his fellows ate at their long refectory tables. He used them to secretly feed birds at his bedroom window, scattering the crumbs on the ledge. Some of the birds grew so tame they even ate from his hand. He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to feed the birds, but if no-one found out … besides, he didn't want the birds to go hungry, they were used to him feeding them now, they were depending on him.

He knew he'd been found out when he came back one day with a pocket full of crumbs and saw that the window had been sealed shut. The birds still came for a while, looking at him expectantly through the glass, but he turned his back, hoping they would understand that there was nothing he could do. As he stopped feeding them, gradually they stopped coming. When they had all finally stopped he told himself he didn't mind. He said it so many times he came to believe that he meant it.

Oddly, this year he'd gotten a Christmas present, and just when he hadn't even asked for one. It had been left on his bare wooden table, an upright oblong shape, covered with a cloth. It had taken him a few seconds to realise what it was: an ant farm. He stared at it in surprise, watching all the ants working diligently away, living a complete life inside their tank. He felt vaguely disappointed. He could see them and watch them, but they he knew would never even know he was there.

He understood it then. He couldn't have a dog, he couldn't have a guinneapig, he couldn't even have birds, instead he could have … insects.

It was early morning in his cold, bare room and he gave a small yawn; his stretching pulled up his pyjama top slightly, revealing his little boy's still slightly protuberant belly. He turned his attention back to the ant farm. Well … alright … you couldn't talk to them and they didn't even know you were there, but it was interesting though, you could watch them … he supposed you could even _control _them.

Later in the day someone came by, checking up on the boys. The man stopped at the room of the boy who used to feed the birds and who had now been given an ant farm instead. He watched the child, the little boy who was probably the cleverest and most gifted they had ever had at the Academy.

The child saw the man out of the corner of his eye and stiffened. He didn't like many of the teachers, he certainly didn't like this one. This one was especially scary. The little boy though of him as 'The Tutor', it was not a good association. He told himself to pretend hard that he was not afraid.

_I must never let them know what I'm thinking, never let anyone know what I'm feeling. They just use it against me._

The Tutor spoke to the boy in the child's native Russian. "Do you like your ants?"

The boy was immediately suspicious. He thought it was an odd question – what was there to like or dislike? The ants didn't even know he was there. But he felt it would be a mistake to say that. "They're interesting," was what he settled for. "I don't think I could give them names though, you can't tell them apart."

The man at the door softened his expression and the little boy felt his shoulders stiffen even further. When The Tutor got that expression – his 'kind' one – you knew there was trouble coming. The man spoke up. "They don't need names," he said silkily, and the little boy's fingers gripped the edge of the table slightly, because that silky tone was always another very bad sign. "After all, how many times have we told you? – we don't have names here."

The man noted the little boy keenly, that child with his golden hair and blue eyes. He knew from records that the child had a dimple when he smiled: the dimple hadn't been seen in a while now, it was a good sign - the training was going well. Watching the boy, he realised the child was almost unknowingly casting an imperious glance at him, as though the boy were dealing with a servant. The man bridled but then remembered: _it's hardly surprising considering his background._

He watched the child hold him in his seemingly fearless gaze.

_Such an astonishing child, you can never tell what he is thinking. Such an instinctive understanding of games and manipulations._

The Tutor turned and left.

_Our finest student. Set to be our greatest accomplishment. He will be perfect, totally suited to his environment: ruthless, cold, calculating, never stopping or slowing down, always angling for an attack. When we have formed him he will be as charming as he is vicious, as cruel as he is self-contained, as perfectly designed for espionage as a shark is to the sea. A masterwork._

_All we have to do is wipe off that last little smudge of humanity …_


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: En Guard** - _to ready yourself and your weapon for the fight._

_The story continues in the now…_

She called out the little boy's name. "Aaron, stay close honey, we've only got little while here and then we're going to the movies!"

She scurried about the Long Beach Aquarium, chasing after a small child. It was the little boy's birthday and as a treat they were doing what he wanted: the aquarium and the cinema.

_Yep, great, _she thought,_ it's sunny day out, so what are we doing? – spending it with the cold fish and then cooped up in the dark!_

"Aaaaaron!" she sang his name as she snatched the scurrying tot back, playfully swinging him up and then landing him safely back on his feet as they went to look at another tank. It was full of Grouper Fish.

"Uh huh," she muttered into the tank "Grouper Fish: handsome as fish go but slow-moving and dumb."

She flicked a glance across at her husband who was chatting up a passing red-head some distance away and weighed him up. Yep, Grouper Fish.

From a shadowy recess, a blond young man observed she, the child and the husband. He stifled a very small yawn. Obviously capturing Dr Caplan was essential to their plans and they'd need the child as leverage, but why they were even bothering with the spouse? He'd only been watching for 15 minutes, but even he could tell the Caplan marriage needed CPR.

Another woman scurrying after a different small child crossed his line of sight. She shivered as she trotted across his gaze, pulling her jacket close about her, muttering, _"why are these places always so cold?"_

The blond watcher ignored her; the cold didn't bother him, he was used to it.

As his line of sight cleared he zeroed in on his quarry again.

As man and wife the two so obviously did not fit.

The husband was tall, dark and blandly handsome, dressed well enough in preppy casuals and exuding a practiced charm.

_Reminds me of that wanker Vaughn_ thought the watcher in the shadows, his mouth quirking with a spasm of disgust.

The woman was small, thin, wan … spindly.

_Nothing like Sydney Bristow then._

The watcher's impenetrable, blue-eyed gaze raked over her. He was attracted to the chic, those with élan, the alluring: there was none of that about her. She lacked even a sniff of style. Blue checked trousers that had shrunk in the wash, flat, clumpy shoes, a man's white cotton shirt, a worn, navy cotton jacket.

The watcher's mouth compressed: yep, one of nature's 'eccentric dressers'.

He distrusted the eccentric, he preferred those who were predictable, they were easier to control. A long while ago he had learned to value control. He had been given an ant farm as a child, and although he had been disappointed by it at first he had come to see how interesting it could be – you could control the ants.

He regarded her as she stood before a tank, her small oval face holding a faintly distracted expression, as though she were singing to herself.

_Looks like the young Mozart on a bad day_.

He reflected that she looked younger than her years. Although nobody knew her exact age - her family hadn't bothered registering her birth until a few years after the event – he knew that her actual birthday was suspected as being sometime in the first half of 1975

_So, same year as Sydney Bristow_.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in sheer self-annoyance. _Oh for fuck's sake Sarkey, will you get your mind off that CIA Vestal Virgin and get it back in the game?_

Mr. Sark, assassin, thief, espionage operative and about to become 'kidnapper', jerked his gaze back to the woman before him and projected his exasperation onto her. With her ill-considered, carelessly worn attire and messy hair, she looked like a wren that had been blown off-course in a storm. He looked her up and down. Yep, there she was, a card carrying genius – his mark, Dr Caplan – and she couldn't even do up the buttons on her jacket correctly. Sark eyed the couple perfunctorily and made up his mind: in the meat market of coupledom, the husband had definitely married down. He watched 'hubby' give the eye to a passing blond, who gave a smirking look back – yes, had married down and knew it. It was clear the wife had seen the exchange but for all her reaction her husband might have been someone just standing next to her in a check out queue. Sark wondered why they didn't just divorce. He knew that the man, woman and child before him weren't even a proper family. The little boy was the woman's four year old nephew. The man and wife could only fake a family.

Annoyed, he thought that nothing matched about the couple, not even their names. 

Sark knew that the wife had initially taken her husband's name – Caplan - but over time had gradually reverted to her maiden name. With his British background he was used to women who kept their husband's names and he reminded himself that he would have to call her 'Dodgson' and not 'Caplan' in his dealings with her. After all, just because one happened to kidnap a person there was no cause to personally insult them.

Her name was an issue anyway. Her teenaged single mother had never married the father – a local boy, name of di Malfi - so the good Doctor's name was that of her mother's family. Her first name was the real oddity though. Sark reflected that only the Americans could give a woman a boy's name – James. What the hell? Where did American's get these ideas from? The naming had even been intentional. When her grandfather had registered her birth, apparently the registrar had been confused by the local Cajun Bayou accent and had taken 'Jaime' to be 'Jamey' and had just written down 'James'.

_Named by mistake and_ – he looked her up and down again – _dressed by accident. What does she do, just put on the first clothes that fall out of the wardrobe?_

The family group drifted across the gallery, moving into his close orbit before veering away. Glumly trapped with each other the married couple didn't notice him. He caught a snatch of their conversation.

"Look, I just feel as though I need time to find myself," moaned the husband.

"You wanna find yourself? – try looking in the mirror less and thinking more," snapped the wife.

Sark fought the urge to ever so quietly grind his jaw. Great, nothing like a noisy, fractious kidnap victim to make his day. From her records he already knew that she reputedly lacked the full deck on 'inter-personal relations'.

Well, at least that'll make a change. 

In his recent sojourn at SD-6 – running errand boy tasks for its chief, Arvin Sloane, even as they both schemed to take the organisation down from within - Sark had dealt up-close but not quite personal enough with Sydney Bristow, a CIA double agent within the ill-intentioned SD-6. He considered her as swimming in empathy; no, make that 'drowning'. In contrast, Dodgson reputedly had almost no filter between mouth and brain.

Tact was apparently an alien concept.

She worked at a cutting-edge engineering company – Neotech – and had once described the senior management as 'butt-monkeys who couldn't even butt-munch'. Nothing unusual there - except that it had been to a live-feed video at a glamorous company event.

Sark's hard blue gaze tracked them. He knew that the criminal organisation 'The Alliance' had once considered recruiting her as Technical Support to one of its SD cells, luring her in with their usual bald-faced lie that they were the CIA. However, she was seen as a disruptive factor and they had decided against it. Sark suspected something else too, the fear among them that she was so bloody bright that she'd have seen right through them.

Reading her file, Sark had been reminded of the SD-6 super-geek, Marshall Flinkman.

_Hi. Welcome. Don't kill me._

Sark gave a dark chuckle when recollecting Marshall's first words to him; of course he wouldn't have killed Marshall, in a bizarre way he'd grown to enjoy his company. His gaze kept track of Dodgson. She reminded him of Marshall alright, but unlike Marshall, Sark suspected that the quick, mentally agile Dodgson – he wondered, what was that American term, 'snarky'? - had the potential to be a right royal pain in the arse.

The trio halted before a jellyfish tank with the boy tugging Dodgson's sleeve and she bending down on one knee, bringing herself to his level. They stared up together at the jellyfish as the child pointed at them and chattered.

Well, she's got enough empathy for the kid at least, Sark thought.

The little boy pointed out his favourite jellyfish – the one who'd come up to the glass earlier to say 'hello'.

"His name's Jello," his child's voice piped out.

A little boy who'd named a jellyfish, even though it probably didn't even know he was there.

Sark shifted uncomfortably against the wall.

_Jello for a jellyfish_.

He knew that only a child that young could be so literal. Children that young dealt only with the surface of things, lacking the comprehension that there could ever be any depths. He knew from experience how it rendered them utterly unquestioning.

He watched Dodgson link hands with her nephew, bending down awkwardly so that he wouldn't have to reach up too high. She laughed at something the little boy said, sounding suddenly ebullient, like an uncorked bottle of champagne.

Mr. Sark came to a decision, he'd leave the husband – Graham Caplan - but the boy was emotional leverage against his mark, the rather important Dr. Dodgson, so he'd take him. Something in him felt discomforted about that, and he revised: okay, he'd take the husband too, after all, someone had to take care of the boy whilst he worked on the aunt.

The snatching of the child was almost painfully easy. He'd split off from his aunt for no more than five seconds – all the time needed. When Sark had bent down to him, the child's innocent reaction was to grin and offer up a piece of candy from a crumpled packet. Sark winced in the face of the boy's sheer trust. Great. He was up against the ultimate weapon – a little kiddie armed with an undimmed soul and complete faith in the power of human goodness.

_Oh just bloody wonderful. I set out as a professional assassin and now I've devolved into some kiddie-snatcher? _

_How did that happen?_

_Just when did I turn into such a creep?_


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3: Engagement** - _contacting the adversary's blade._

Standing in the aquarium, Sark shut down his self-questioning; only in his early twenties, he had already learned that it didn't pay.

Mr. Sark didn't 'do' introspection.

As far as he was concerned he had his own aims and agendas, whether the ends justified the means wasn't the point, he'd made his compromises with morality long ago. He'd had to, like it or not his was the kind of life which once started had an almost clockwork inevitability about it. Once you were set on the left hand path, the only thing you could do it seemed was to keep walking.

He had spoken to his mentor, Irina Derevko, about it once. _'It's like sharks in a shark tank Irina – once you're in there's no way out, all you can be is the biggest shark in it.' _Sark had determined to be a Great White; hell-bent that he and Irina were going to be as safe as they could be at the very top of the food chain.

Once he'd snatched the boy, the husband was easy. The couple had split up to find him and his crew had jumped the man as he'd wandered off to the gift shop to see if the child was there. As with most people, his reaction to the onslaught of sudden violence was to freeze up – meekly allowing himself to be lead away.

The aunt was somewhat different.

She had raced around wildly, calling out the child's name in an increasing panic – _Aaron!_ - trying to enlist the help of strangers, asking if they'd seen the child, asking if they'd help look. Sark knew she was wasting her time there, he knew it was the human condition to veer away from the wretchedness of others, as though misfortune were catching.

He hadn't even had to track her down to grab her: ricocheting blindly, Dr. Dodgson had run bodily into him, going so hard she had actually bounced off.

Sark wasn't unusually tall, at just on six foot his height fell within the range of average, he liked it that way, it rendered him less conspicuous. Truth was he already had enough else to render him eye-catching: his hair colouring, his eyes - his everything actually - it was as though Nature herself conspired against his secretive role in life. But even so, in comparison to him Dr Dodgson was so small that when she ran in to him the top of her head barely reached up to his mouth.

Without thinking he reached out a hand to steady her as she rocked back off him; in turn she instinctively flung out an arm to right herself, clutching his shoulder so that they unwittingly made a circuit.

She stopped dead, teetering back on her heels from the impact, and was caught by his intent blue gaze. He would help her, wouldn't he? This man with the direct, almost glittering stare? She made her mouth move.

"A boy – a little boy," she gasped out, her words tumbling over themselves in a panic. _Slow down you jerk, he needs to understand you to help you! _"He's only four." _Get a grip, hysterics won't help!_ "He's 'bout so-high," she held her hand down to indicate his height, "brown hair, blue stripy T-shirt, gappy little grin?" She felt a rising panic. "He's only four!" She dug around in her panicking mind. What was that word people used to get help? 'Please'? She tried it. "Please?" She stared up at the stranger. "Please? He's lost."

The man gave a warm, expansive smile but when she tried to mirror it her attempt couldn't hold and melted into an expression of her utter distress. She felt his grip on her arm tighten at this, and she was suddenly sure from the way he held her that he was going to get involved. He was gazing straight at her, not through her as other people had, he would help.

"Dr. Dodgson. Would you like me to …" Uh? James Dodgson's mind was numbed by a vague astonishment. What? - he had a clipped British accent? And he knew her name? The stranger's words re-imposed themselves through her confusion. "Would you like me to help locate your nephew?" His voice slowed to let the inference sink in, "… and your husband?"

She realised that the man who gripped her arm was pulling her toward him. She looked at him for a moment in blank incomprehension, and then she got it. He wasn't here to help, he was here to harm - they were being snatched.

There were reasons why she didn't collapse under the pressure and just let herself be lead away. One was that upon graduation she'd been interviewed by the NSA, they hadn't recruited her, but she'd been told she could expect to be 'contacted' by the Russians/ Chinese/ Iraqis/ whoever. She could remember their speeches now: "axis of evil…blah, blah…world domination … blah, blah, blah … deadly organisations … blah." She'd laughed out loud in their faces at the time, but had mentally filed it away so if anything ever did happen she'd be forewarned. Another reason was, that she was who she was.

She'd been born a brilliant, totally unforeseen offshoot of Cajun Bayou folk in a region so isolated they didn't even have proper roads. Rather than brilliant, as a toddler the family had thought she was simple. It was hardly surprising. She didn't speak a word until aged two, but then came her very first words, a fully formed sentence, grammatically correct and intelligibly enunciated: _I want an apple._

If she'd been born a few centuries earlier, the townsfolk might have burned her as a witch.

Later in life her grandfather had asked her why she had not spoken sooner. She had shrugged, answering in her curling Bayou drawl, 'didn't seem much point in speakin' till I knew I could be understood'.

Cursed with a brilliant mind, James Dodgson hadn't enjoyed childhood, she'd _survived_ it As a kid her schooling had been haphazard, some days she'd go to class, some days she wouldn't, some tests she bother to take, some tests she didn't. Her family and township were stunned when she'd snagged a series of prestigious scholarships and had escaped to ivy clad universities. James had survived her early years by depending upon herself, by being in a continual state of Defcon 4, always ready to go to Defcon 5. Well, she was ready now.

She kicked her blond opponent straight off, no hesitation, hacking her heavy, ugly shoe straight into his shin, and then she started screaming.

She registered that he gave a tiny flicker of surprise at her attack, but no flinch of pain. For his part Sark registered just one thought: _fuck, that hurt!_

He snapped-to and grabbed her, spinning her round and heaving her off her feet and carrying her with her arms trapped against her torso. He fastened his free hand over her mouth, turning her scream into the muffled yowl of an angry cat.

Hauled up off her feet and being hustled out, Dodgson was stunned. What the fuck? She struggled, but the man was terrifyingly quick and strong. The realisation hit her: he did this for a living! She began to truly panic. She bucked like a fish on a line and got out a scream before he clamped his hand over her mouth again, then she remembered her legs and started drumming her heels backwards into his shins, heaving and twisting to escape. As she struggled on, the scant number of mid-week trippers began to look in their direction – some merely curious, others irritated, but none sure what to do.

Hell you ass-hats, can't you tell I'm being kidnapped? 

The man's voice cut across her thoughts, his beautifully articulated British accent carrying clearly, not remotely breathless despite her efforts.

"Darling, honestly, I know I've betrayed our marriage and that it will take time to get the trust back, but you've got to believe me, it's over between she and I."

Relief rippled through the thin crowd, it was only a spat between a couple of young marrieds after all. If anything, as they snatched glances at the screaming, bucking harridan – the strange woman who'd been running about wildly earlier, what had she been shouting about then? - they felt sorry for the handsome young husband.

If she hadn't felt the sing of fear, James would have given in to hysterical laughter at the audacity of it. Whoever this bastard was, he was going to get away with kidnapping a struggling woman from a public place in broad daylight!

He was carrying her towards a back-stairs fire exit. She slammed a foot against the door jamb, wedging her leg there as she heaved and struggled, trying to keep herself lodged inside the gallery. He didn't slacken his grip on her for an instant.

"Really darling," a trace of exasperation this time, hitting just the right tone, "we must discuss our marital discords outside."

An incongruous thought broke through her panic._ 'Marital discords'? What kinda fancy-talkin' kidnapping bastard is this? _

She tried to snap her head back – to hit him in the face with it – but it was an ineffectual effort and simply glanced off him. He heaved her through the door and instantly dropped the concerned husband act. He hurled her round to face him, scooped her over his shoulder and ran down the stairs toward a car park.

Her eyes began to water from the repeated thumps she got from his shoulder. She was continually winded and couldn't scream. But … she had her hands free! One threshing hand landed on something lying in the small of his back – a knife handle! She went for it, fumbling the knife out of his waistband, but he'd felt her movement and whisked her round and caught her. He'd reached his crew now and one of them clamped a hand over her mouth to stop her screams for help: she bit down instantly, no shrinking back, freeing her mouth to let rip another shriek. She was still screaming and shrieking as two of his men physically picked her up and tossed her into the back of a windowless black van like a sack of turnips.

She bounced off the far wall from the impact, collapsing to the floor but immediately trying to get up. She hauled in breath and shrieked again. The man she'd already labelled 'Blond Guy' – her kidnapper - viewed her struggles with an almost amazed regard.

Well, Sark thought, whatever else you held against her – dress sense, deportment, diction - you couldn't fault her for enthusiasm.

One of his crew reached in and air-hypoed her in the neck, she slumped to the floor in a boneless heap. There was a sudden silence.

The man bending over her stated the obvious, "She's unconscious."

"Really?" Sark's voice held a hint of sarcasm as he leapt lightly into the back of the van. "I didn't realise. When the screaming stopped I just thought I'd gone deaf."

Despite his urbane tone he surveyed the collapsed woman before him with exasperation. _Christ what a nightmare! How could someone that small make so much noise?_

Checking her eyes, he assessed her state of consciousness for himself, she wasn't quite fully under yet so he could still see the irises as she slid away. He was surprised to find that he had already registered their colour: violet. He shrugged to himself and thought nothing of it, he must have only noted it because it was such an unusual shade.

Hours later James Dodgson began to come-to, slowly, gently, a bather floating just below the surface who was then jarred awake by the thrumm and vibration of engine-roar.

Her mind was groggy and slow - she couldn't seem to move her arms - and then she jerked into half-wakefulness at the burgeoning memory of what had happened. That had all been a nightmare, right? She was going to wake up now, right?

The thrumming was insistent, loud, heavy.

_A car? – no, too heavy, more like … an airplane?_

She struggled to get her leaden eyes open, only to see 'Blond Guy' leaning forward, regarding her intently from a seat opposite. He watched with all the dispassion of a man checking an animal import consignment.

She was trapped inside a moving cargo plane.

A stunned, disbelieving sensation spiralled up through her. She couldn't be being kidnapped, she couldn't be! It was mad! It was a mistake! Aaron had kindergarten tomorrow! _Where was Aaron? _Her mind tried to grind up through the gears – she hadn't seen Aaron in the back of that van, and she couldn't see him around her now -

_What the fuck is going on? This is crazy stuff!_

"Where am I? What have you done?" Her hysterical note was slurred by the drug still in her system. She found she couldn't move her arms because she was chained to one of the plane's interior struts.

Her internal monologue focussed, over-riding her alarm.

_Okay soldier suppress that panic. So, there's gonna be no bad-dream get out of jail free card. The upside? Maybe you're the only one they snatched. More upside? The Government's going to come looking for you – and Neotech are when you don't show up for work tomorrow. Okay, so Neotech don't actually like you – but that's okay, 'cos they need you. Anyhow, 'tomorrow' might have already happened, they may be looking right now!_

"You're crazy," she said, only to find that her throat felt raw and sore and that her own voice hurt her ears, "you won't get away with this!"

_He already has _went a sly inner voice.

She forcibly ignored it and tried to calm herself and took another tack: aiming for a hopeful, wheedling timidity. "Look Mister, are you sure you've got the right woman?" She smugly congratulated herself on her cunning switch of tactics.

Sark gave a slight flicker of disdain at her pathetic effort to undermine the situation. _Did he have the right woman? For Christ's sakes! _"Yes, Dr. James Dodgson, or if you prefer," he ran through her diminutives, "Jimmy Dodge, or just 'Dodge'."

She stared at him, trying to keep her heavy eyelids open, and wondered: just what was it about the British that let them do 'patronising' so well?

Sark dismissively lowered his attention back to his laptop. "Really, 'am I sure I've got the right woman?' What kind of question is that?"

She felt insulted, patronised and … angry. Well, as hopefulness, modesty and timidity hadn't cut it, she decided to revert to type. She fastened her blurry gaze on him, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth. "The kind with a question mark at the end, dumb-ass."

He looked up, annoyed, his gaze a sharp glint. He'd had a bad day and the last thing Sark wanted was to be insulted by his own kidnap victim. He reached across and she heard the hissed _ka-tish_ of the air-hypo again, as her last thoughts were: _whatever you do, don't go und –_ as she was sent down into darkness again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4: Just Distance** - _the distance at which you are close enough to hit your opponent, and they are close enough to hit you. _

In a glass fronted cell in a basement of the L.A. section of the CIA, Irina Derevko, ex-KGB, ex K-Directorate and ex-The Man, unobtrusively and repeatedly clenched her jaw. The accompanying slight tilt of her head saw one of her antique earrings come into contact with her fine jaw line, the electrical pulse in the muscle movement was picked up by the earring's molecularly restructured crystal and was transmitted out as an undetectable signal.

Sark received it as a pulse against his wrist. It was an easily discernible rhythm, even in competition with the thrumming of the plane's engines.

Unlike Irina to be so anxious for news, he reflected.

He responded to her, tapping out his own signal: _component collected._

He flicked a look at the 'component' - James Dodgson, inert, opposite him.

Christ! How could one small woman have been so bloody difficult to collect? And the sodding _attitude _on her! _Oh shut up and get back on the clock Sarkey._

He continued tapping: _switches collected. All in transit._

By 'switches' he was referring to the two further hostages – the leverage he might need to get Dodgson 'switched on' and running.

Almost unwillingly Sark found himself appraising Dodgson's appearance again, his look finishing at her thin ankles and small feet shod in large ugly shoes. He would have felt far more confident if he hadn't just spotted that their plan was dependent upon someone who wore odd socks.

Well, no need to alarm Irina.

He signalled off.

Sark knew that Dodgson had to 'run' for them. It may have been Sloane's idea to kidnap Dodgson - he had stumbled across her existence through reading her obscurely published scientific papers on Knot Theory. Obscure? - she was hard to find even on the internet! – but Sark and Irina intended to use her for their own ends. Sark realised that he wasn't sure what Irina's ends were exactly – was he ever? - but his was a brute determination to get her out of that damned glass box in the basement of the CIA!

Hearing from Sark, Irina lent back against the stone wall of her cell and allowed herself one small smile. If the end to her captivity was not yet in sight, then at least this was the beginning of the end.

She could admit to herself that it was a relief, after all, it wasn't every woman whose husband was happy to help keep her incarcerated - when he wasn't fitting her up for attempting to murder their daughter and trying to have her executed!

Jack had tried to have her killed.

The knowledge weighed stubbornly within her.

_Dammit! When we were married, I thought he loved me! I thought I had had him fooled, not the other way round!_

Okay, she had married CIA agent Jack Bristow on orders from the KJB, posing as Laura Bristow, but what the hell? He had loved her, right? And she was still the same woman, right?

Irina still did not believe he would actually have had her executed; he wouldn't, would he? He had been planning to save her at the last minute? Well, that was what she had told herself when she had upped the anti and hastened her own execution with a plea of guilty to all crimes charged.

Metaphorically she'd stood there, chin out, hands on hips, calling Jack's bluff.

Only to find later that it hadn't been Jack who had reprieved her. He had already been slung in jail himself; their daughter, Sydney, had saved them both.

When he stood before her on the other side of that glass wall these days, giving her nothing but his impassive poker face, she told herself that she cared for him as little as he cared for her.

She gave a small huff of exasperation.

And they way he stood there, still obviously not trusting her, even now after she'd saved all their lives in Kashmir! Honestly – couldn't he at least _pretend_ to believe her when she lied to him?

Back on the plane Sark pondered on Irina's position. What to make of a known enemy of the United States who had chosen to hand herself over to the tender mercies of the CIA, an organisation which had already tried to incarcerate her daughter, Sydney Bristow, for life?

And Sydney had been one of its most valued agents for God's sake!

Irina had laid out her walk-in as part of a complex plan to gain access to CIA held Rambaldi artefacts, but they could have pulled that off in any number of other ways. No, Irina would never admit it, but Sark was sure there were other reasons for her actions.

He knew that it was partly Irina's stated plan that, by being held at what he privately considered 'Dunce Central', she would have the chance to create a connection with Sydney, a connection that would eventually enable her to move forward in her plans for 'the Prophesy' – and God how he wanted to roll his eyes at mention of that 'prophesy' bollocks. However, Sark strongly suspected that after shooting Sydney in Taipei, Irina had been simply overcome by an urge to contact her child.

And to see Jack Bristow too? He wouldn't put it past her.

Irina being Irina of course, she couldn't just fire up the barbeque and invite them on over for surf'n'turf, no she had to dress it up in complex manoeuvres designed to hide her motives from others, and on this occasion to hide them even from herself?

Sark pondered it. Well, if Irina's eventual success and extraction didn't come off, then it would be because the plan was much too convoluted.

Mr. Sark disapproved of the convoluted.

In his experience even the most simple plans were prone to mishap – so why increase the odds by wilfully compounding the detail? This wasn't gymnastics where one was awarded extra points for 'degree of difficulty'.

Sark's gaze flicked back to James Dodgson, his eye caught by a stray frond of her messy hair. Here was an example of 'prone to mishap' right in front of him. Who would have thought she'd have put up such a fight? With hindsight he ought to have drugged her from the off and carried her out as a fainting case, but then everyone was a genius in hindsight. Drugging her should have attracted more attention than just walking her out – as he'd been able to do with the husband.

Well, he had her now, so controlling her shouldn't prove too difficult.

Yes, even the most simple plans were prone to mishap. Sark wondered where the trip-up would come in this endeavour.

He rubbed his shin where Dodgson had whacked him, flicking her an irritated look. Great. He had Irina trapped in a glass cell in L.A. – the situation giving him a drip-feed of subliminal guilt - and James Dodgson lashing out at him in person like an angry cat.

Bloody women!


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5:** **Scholar's Privilege** - _an English tradition of excluding attacks to the face during practice with novices. _

Sark stood in the dingy warehouse where they held Dodgson.

He was a distinctly aggrieved young man.

On his arrival in Europe he'd been keenly looking forward to taking just 24 hours out to hit the bars, take in a couple of art house movies, and fuck himself senseless in the expert company of a couple of Artan Silenko's ever so obliging whores. And what did he get instead? The run-around from Arvin Sloane – again – no RnR anywhere in sight, and now the possibility that he'd have to torture Dodgson. Needless to say, he'd be the one to inflict the actual pain, Sloane never got his hands dirty.

It was a scenario where he felt as uncomfortable as a wet cat being stroked up the wrong way.

_Well torture's off the agenda and that's it. There's no point to it. If we want her to work the Rambaldi problem, she can't do it if she's too scared to think … _

Sark didn't address the fact directly, but he found it loathsome whenever he was forced to physically torture a woman. He'd do it, he'd done it before and he could do it again, but he hardly relished it.

His mind ground through his annoyance.

Arvin. Fucking. Sloane.

Yep, kidnapping, torture and coercion, it had Arvie all over it. His own plan had been straightforward and simple – just approach her quietly and pay her to do what they wanted. Anything wrong with that? Nothing! – except it wasn't _convoluted_ enough!

He felt positively martyred, almost self-pitying.

_No rest for the wicked?_ _I'm living proof!_

James awoke in a dirty open space lit by a wall of neon lights. Her foggy mind tried to process the information: _underground?_

A man who looked like a genetic experiment gone wrong between a rat and a monkey was peering into her face from six inches away. She tried to focus on him but he was blurry and when he spoke his words came as though from a far off room.

"Are you sure the drugs had no permanent damaging effect?" he asked.

She tried to shift her gaze to watch Blond Guy answer, but it was like trying to move a heavy piece of furniture with just her eyelids.

"Quite sure," Sark opined - s_he'd better be, or Irina's going to have my arse._

James slowly realised that she was slumped over a table and registered something cold on her wrists, she instinctively tried to pull her hands away only to find that she couldn't –'the cold' was shackles. She noted that Blond Guy's only response to her movement was to hit her with a flat, annoyed gaze and allow his black leather jacket to swing open, deliberately displaying the gun he wore on his hip.

Somewhere off, a heavy industrial-sounding door clanged shut with what could only be described as 'finality'.

She took in the situation: chained up, and guys with guns? She wasn't going to talk her way out of this one.

She groggily looked about her, stiff neck straightening painfully, head feeling as though it were about to roll off and go crashing to the floor like a bowling ball. She saw that the 'walls' were wire mesh, there was a steel table, cheap metal chairs and a lot of chains pointlessly hanging from pulleys.

Bet the chains are here just to make the place look extra scary! 

Yep - Deco Scary Industrial. James Dodgson ignored Rat Guy who was continuing to gaze into her eyes from less than a hand span away and instead looked around her: _chains, mesh, black leather, _she looked over at Blond Guy from out of one eye as the other closed against the painfully bright light, _and_ _pretty boys?_ Her mind snapped-to, she glared at Rat Guy.

"What is this, the back room at a gay bar?"

Sark blinked – _yep, the files had been right about one thing, she had unpredictable responses alright_.

Rat Guy leant back in his seat, seemingly pleased that she was mentally alert. He ignored her question.

"Dr. Dodgson, my name is Arvin Sloane."

James' mind flared into action, clawing together information from her scant, long off briefing by the NSA and adding it to anything she'd gleaned from about a dozen spy movies. He'd told her his name. That was a bad thing, right? Because now he wasn't going to let her go anytime soon, like, ever? She noticed a slight pause as though he expected her to respond. _Where was Aaron?_

"Where's my family?" she shouted.

Well, she _tried_ to shout, but her voice felt as though it were sandpapering her throat – from the inside out.

"They're alive, and if you co-operate you'll be re-united with them soon enough," responded Sloane smoothly.

Re-united with them soon enough? Yeah, sure I won't, thought James - _because you've already told me who you are, you lying asshole!_

"Years ago I was with the Army Corps of Engineers." Sloane carried on as though he were an actor with a script he had to get through. "They wanted me to study this." He indicated a half-opened leather document box on the table. "That manuscript is over 500 years old. These sketches were drawn by a man named Milo Rambaldi." James found Sloane's voice sibilant, sinuous, as though he were sliding into her mind; she tried to push him out. "You will see that Rambaldi prophesied scientific principals centuries ahead of his time." That pushing, insinuating voice again. "Prototypes of his designs have turned up all over the world; for the past 30 years I've been collecting them." His voice, it was mesmerising, as though he was sucking her under. "You're going to help me put them together because, you see Dr. Dodgson I know that you feel you are only a hostage right now, - " it was his hypnotic, lulling voice, if she didn't fight now …

James' mind reared up. "Oh puhleeze, just shut up you asshole! There is no way I am gonna help you! I don't believe you even _have _my family! They weren't in that van when you snatched me - "

"Doctor," Sloane cut across her, a slight note of vexation at being so interrupted, "I assume you became a scientist to discover the lost secrets of the universe, hence you will help me and as to there being 'no way', there are many ways." He stilled, smiling with what appeared to be an almost avuncular concern, it sat ill with his next words. "If you do not comply, you may have to learn that there is something special about pain Doctor - "

"Yeah, it hurts."

" – that makes it a highly effective incentive." Sloane glanced behind him. "Mr. Sark, if you please?"

James whipped her gaze in the direction of 'Mr. Sark' a.k.a. Blond Guy. _Great, another fucking name, just what I needed. And Sark? What kinda name's 'Sark'? _She saw that Sloane had addressed Blond Guy in a careless fashion, as though he were a servant; her stare followed 'Sark', her voice calling out tauntingly. She attacked because she was scared."Well lookey, the class-room good boy, The Ass-Kissing Goodie Two Shoes of Evil." She jolted to a halt as she saw the small medical trolley 'Mr. Sark' had approached. It was full of nasty little objects. Scalpels – yes she definitely noticed the scalpels - pins, skewers, syringes, hammers, chisels, shit – _was that a blow torch?_ The inference didn't need to be voiced.

There was a long silence in the room.

Sark slid an annoyed, glittering glance at her, James caught it. With his blond hair and blue eyes he looked like a choirboy who'd been at the communion wine.

_Still think it's clever to call me the Goodie Two Shoes of Evil, Doctor?_

In a dangerous situation Sark knew he looked at his most terrifying when he smiled. So, he smiled: open, engaging, almost cheeky.

James' response was to glare up at Sloane, cutting him off in mid-speech.

"When those space aliens took you up into their big ole' ship, just how many times did they stick the anal probe up your ass?" Sloane stopped abruptly, uncomprehending. "I don't know what medication you're on you grimy-souled old weirdo, but someone better double the dosage!" Her voice rose to a shout. "And you wanna find the _lost_ secrets of the universe, ass-hat? Start where I usually do, try looking down the back of the sofa!"

Sloane's gaze flickered uncertainly.

Sark watched James intently. He'd been blind-sided by James Dodgson before, he didn't want it to happen twice. He was in an enclosed room with a chained up prize asset, a man he considered to be roving, unstable megalomaniac, and with a trolley full of weapons. Not comfy. James Dodgson's unpredictability was something Sark knew he was going to have to control - one wrong turn and she was going to push Sloane over an edge.

James ripped on.

"And what do you mean? I _feel_ I am only a hostage right now? I _am_ a fucking hostage, you moron! What are you, dressing this up as some kinda' social occasion? I am chained to a table, while Blond Boy here threatens me with a scalpel - "

Sark bristled - _Boy?_

" – and you're saying you've got my nephew held captive someplace - "

Sark noticed she didn't mention her husband.

" – and you think I'm gonna be thankin' you for giving me the answers to what the universe has to offer?" She'd run out of breath, so took a deep one before her next shouted assault. "Now, where's my fuckin' family?"

Dr. James Dodgson was glaring at Sloane, and Sloane was sliding into a rage.

_Whoopsadaisy!_

'Boy' or not, Sark knew he had to intervene before things got completely out of hand. Sark may have been a servant, may even have partly seen himself as one, but he was Irina Derevko's servant, and not Arvin Sloane's. He was buggered if he was going to let the older man screw up the game for him.

"Dr. Dodgson." His English accent cut through the air. "As to whether we genuinely hold your husband and nephew captive, or simply have 'liar' on our job descriptions, please be assured that we do hold them." He'd moved across to where Dodgson and Sloane still had each other on visual lockdown. He issued her a directive, his voice hardening. "Look at me Dr. Dodgson."

James continued to glare at Sloane. "No thanks, I'm scared I'll go blind from all that smugness."

Sark tersely reached into an inside jacket pocket and pulled out a cell-phone with video-capture capacity, he positioned it in her line of sight. "Look."

As he'd calculated, she had to break her gaze to see the small screen on the cell-phone. She was rewarded with a picture of a stunned looking Graham and a shock-faced Aaron. Sark could almost see her mind working – back-pedalling to take on-board the new information whilst pulling herself together to get back in the game. It took her two seconds. He might almost have been impressed if she hadn't been annoying him so bloody much.

From a position of almost no leverage, she slammed down an ultimatum. "If you want me to help you – let my family go. It's the only way."

Sloane smiled, shifting back from his look of dead eyed rage to one of almost unctuous paternal concern. _That's it_, encouraged Sark telepathically, _get it back under control now nice Uncle Arvie_.

"That is not the only way, " said Sloane. He held up his own cell-phone and an audio message came spilling out, Graham Caplan's voice pleading: _do whatever they want or they're going to hurt Aaron._

There was a silence as the words echoed in the air. Sark could feel James, her face draining white, quietly processing her options. He knew it wouldn't take long, she didn't have any.

When she eventually spoke, she was angry but quiet.

"Surprised you didn't just offer to pay me, there needn't have been any of this. I could have just done what normal folk do – worked for money."

Sark recalled his own plan, one not unakin to Dodgson's suggestion – well, it was always nice to know someone agreed with him. Too late now though.

"True, Dr. Dodgson," he responded, effectively excluding Sloane until he was sure the older man had a grip on himself, "but it might have been difficult to extract you from your current employ, and besides, people will do things for love which they would never do for money."

James looked up at him and gave a splutter of sour derision. "Yeah right, like you'd know anything about love."

Sark stared down at her, tutting in a parody of flirtatiousness. "Oh and now you're just trying to hurt my feelings."

"I'd have to find them first."

Sark's jaw shifted, and well it might, verbally she'd just punched him in it.

"So," he enquired, plastering a pleasant politeness over an annoyed scowl, "do we now have a 'yes' to co-operation? It's a clear enough choice Doctor, if you help us, you and your family will be released, or if you do not …" He let the unspoken alternative hang in the air. "Do we have an agreement Dr. Dodgson? I do hope so, and just to let you know, there's no help coming for you; we're not even in America, we're in Switzerland."

"Lucky me. I always wanted to visit Europe."

James Dodgson did battle against Sark's bland gaze whilst Sark firmly reminded himself that he held the world's non-blinking record.

A quote flitted across James' mind – something about a 'game for thugs played by gentlemen'.

"Let me guess," she said, "you play polo, right?"

Sark blinked but remained silent.

"Or then again," she continued, "maybe just tiddlywinks, but with live tiddlers."

"I repeat Doctor, do we have a deal?"

At Sark's words James' gaze cut away into a corner, mouth compressed in frustration. There was a long moment of silence in which she tried to think of any way forward other than the obvious: there wasn't one.

"Alright then you bullying ass-hats," she spat, "yes, you have a deal."

A semblance of calm proceeded to assert itself, Sloane no longer wanted to kill Dodgson, and Dodgson pretended she no longer wanted to kill both Sloane and Sark. Sloane emptied the leather document box and began spreading the manuscript pages about – introducing each sheet as though it were a favoured child. James began to focus on them and by the time Sloane made to leave she had every appearance of being absorbed.

On his way out Sloane turned. "By the way, Doctor, if I may? Other than what I've told you, do you know anything else about Milo Rambaldi?"

James gave it less than a second's casual thought before drawling her answer at him without looking up. "Sure, his name's an anagram for _I am all morbid_."

From her shackled position James Dodgson found herself glancing up, only to catch Blond Guy gazing at her and biting his lip, tugging at it with his teeth from the inside. Her face screwed up in resentment and not a little fear: _pretty blond bastard!_

Outside with Sloane, Sark nearly bit through his lip entirely when the elder man broke the bad news.

"You're on baby sitting duty Mr. Sark."

Sark fought down a flurry of annoyed thoughts, what won out was the realisation that he decidedly did _not _want to be in that role. Christ, he'd already shepherded Dodgson for 24 hours straight, he didn't need more of the same.

He asked an unnecessary question.

"I take it you mean baby sitting Dr. Dodgson, rather than her relatives?"

If Sloane had known Sark as well as Irina did, he would have immediately questioned as to why he was asking. Irina knew that Mr. Sark did not ask unnecessary questions and that when he did it was a stall for time, to enable him to get an agenda in order. But Mr. Sloane did not truly know Mr. Sark.

"Mr. Sark, after being kidnapped and abducted, the first thing Dr. Dodgson did on coming round was to insult us – at length and in depth. The woman is either the bravest and boldest kidnap victim I have ever encountered, or she is quite frankly the stupidest. As I am fully aware of the extent of her intelligence, my money has to be on brave and bold." He paused, "I feel a need to counterbalance Dr. Dodgson's intellect with your own abilities in the event of," he chose the word carefully, "contingencies." He meant if she had to be tortured, beaten or killed. "You are staying here with her. Arrange for alternative care of the bargaining chips." By 'bargaining chips' he meant the husband and the nephew. His tone toward Sark was once again peremptory, addressing him as though he were a private secretary.

Sark was annoyed at both the tone and the instructions but didn't show it - he was too keenly aware of the slithering sense of danger he got around Sloane, of the man's sinuous ability to slide inside another's mind and somehow press the weak spots. He suspected that to withstand a man like Sloane, a person would need a shield of unyielding moral rectitude and there he was at a disadvantage: he didn't have moral rectitude, he'd been subsisting on 'moral relativism' since aged four.

Well, he'd have to rely on the old trick of picturing someone in their underwear instead. He weighed up Sloane.

_Yep, all grubby, grey and tired elastic._

He had used Sloane's speech-time to run through his own agenda.

No matter how he cut it, staying was more effective than going in achieving his and Irina's ends. If he left, Slone might abscond with Dodgson, or Sloane might hire someone to mind her who would beat her head in out of sheer annoyance at her. Sark couldn't afford to lose Dodgson. He repressed his exasperation – God, babysitting was going to be a chore – and instead nodded with his customary mask of pleasant, almost school-boy politeness.

"Certainly Mr. Sloane."

_Author's notes:_ 'Artan Silenko's whores' is a reference to Auburn's very funny Sarkney fic, _Bad Wigs, Black Leather and Guns._

The 'back of the sofa' joke is taken from Cassandra Claire's _Draco Trilogy_, but in turn she acknowledges that she got it from _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6: 'Spada Di Filo' And 'Waster'**

_Spada di filo – a sharp sword._

_Waster – a wooden blade used for the most fundamental practice only, useless as a cutting weapon._

In the briefing room at the L.A. branch of the CIA, Assistant Director Kendall held forth on the very recent 'Caplan' kidnapping.

At least two people in the room weren't giving their full attention: Agent Sydney Bristow and Agent Michael Vaughn were instead exchanging coy glances. After the CIA takedown of SD-6 the pair had finally, after a year of skirting about it, 'gotten it on'.

The third person not paying full attention was Sydney's father, Agent Jack Bristow – he had caught the tone between the two agents and was a man suddenly aware that his only daughter was sleeping with the man sitting next to her - someone he considered to be beneath her. He may have once used Vaughn's services in getting Sydney out of the hands of the CIA's own Rambaldi obsessives, but that didn't mean he had ever truly respected him.

Jack was fully aware that Michael Vaughn would only ever be a washed out copy of his father, Bill Vaughn. He knew that Michael Vaughn had only entered the CIA to follow his father; if Bill Vaughn had been an electrician, would Michael Vaughn now be wiring plugs?

Sitting across from Jack, Vaughn was unaware of the other man's deepening dislike of him. Instead he looked over at the daughter again and dipped his head and tried to hide his smile of genuine warmth; he and Sydney were finally together. Vaughn experienced the inner glow he got at the start of any new relationship, at that point when he realised that the person he had wanted, wanted him too. He didn't know how some people could go through life without having someone at their side; well, now he had Sydney.

"So," Kendall wound up, "Sark has the Caplans. Seems that tweaking the CIA's nose is becoming Mr. Sark's favourite sport."

"Nah," spoke up Agent Weiss, rock solid field agent and friendly with Vaughn, "Sark's favourite sport's _mindfucking_, everyone knows that."

Kendall stared Weiss down. Vaughn cringed and tried to pretend he wasn't sitting next to him.

As the meeting broke up, Sydney frantically signalled Vaughn to go after her dad. The night before they had discussed breaking the news of their relationship to her father and had both decided that he would respect Vaughn for being the one to tell him. Well, Sydney had decided it and Vaughn had gone along with it. He didn't exactly feel easy about taking on Jack Bristow, but he didn't want Sydney thinking that he couldn't stand up to her father. As he caught up with Jack, Vaughn fixed a smile to his face, moving to straighten his tie: time to have that 'beer on the front porch' talk.

Jack turned to see Vaughn's grin and wasn't sure whether he felt his heart harden or sink. Jack was a man who was unwilling to show his emotions, he wasn't even sure if he was willing to have them. The woman he had married, Sydney's mother, Laura – no make that _Irina_ - had seen to that, but here Vaughn was, obviously aiming to have 'a talk' about Sydney. Even if it were necessary, were the time and place really appropriate? Torn between distrust and distaste Jack looked down into the eyes of the younger man and saw what was always there: fear.

It wasn't even an honest fear, something out there and openly admitted, but some slithering secret thing that lived at the back of Vaughn's eyes, and it was always there. It was the first thing Jack had ever noticed about him and the only thing he had ever really needed to know – that the guy was permanently scared. Scared of failure, scared of retribution, scared of somehow being 'found out' as less than he pretended. Jack reflected that on missions Vaughn could dress up in black leather jackets and go unshaven all he liked, but no tough-guy pretence could ever wipe out the anxiety in those eyes.

Looking up, Vaughn's rehearsed words deserted him as he flinched beneath Jack's stonewall gaze.

"Well … I … Mr. Bristow … ." Vaughn stumbled and started again. "Jack – I'm sure you realise that Sydney and I … I - "

"I have a meeting with tech support in five minutes. Whatever you want to talk about, are you sure there's time for the discussion now?"

Vaughn's gaze wavered. Weiss had joked earlier, _'What's the worst that can happen, he beats you to death in public?' _Maybe Weiss hadn't been joking about the 'beating to death' part? Looking over Jack's shoulder, Vaughn caught a glimpse of Sydney standing across the room, grinning and nodding encouragement. A few feet away from her Weiss was giving a hopeful double-thumbs up from behind his desk.

Shit, thought Vaughn, I can't even back out.

He dug for an upside. Okay, if he did it now then Jack's imposition of a short time frame might be an advantage, it meant this had to be over with quickly, however it went, right? He shifted his gaze back to Jack and pressed the re-set button in his head. Perhaps it would be best to pursue the line of professional integrity – how their involvement would not let Syd down on missions, stuff like that? He swallowed slightly.

"Jack, I understand you must have concerns and I - " 

Jack felt his mood slide from stonewall to basilisk. So despite his heavy hint that he decidedly did not want this contact, Vaughn still wanted to talk? Very well then, they'd talk. Jack's voice cut across the younger man.

"Mr. Vaughn, you aren't _evolved _enough to understand my concerns." Vaughn pulled up short, his eyes widening. Jack continued, "nevertheless, I shall attempt to communicate them." Jack spoke smoothly, almost conversationally, letting his words alone do the damage. "Mr. Vaughn, I want you to be fully aware that you are a man – no make that a 'boy' - who is just not good enough for my daughter."

Vaughn's face involuntarily coloured as he as was swept by a mix of disbelief, embarrassment, and, underlying it all, apprehension. This definitely did not reflect the conversation he had planned out in his mind.

"I don't appreciate men who lead women on," finished Sydney Bristow's father.

Vaughn fought down a sense of inner vertigo. Lead women on? What was Jack Bristow talking about? He looked about him uneasily. Didn't the man realise they were in an office? Was this really the time and the place?

"Mr. Bristow," Vaughn he backed off from using Jack's first name – that had obviously been a mistake, "I'm sorry, but I have not lead Sydney on."

"I'm talking primarily about Alice Weston."

Vaughn was stunned - Alice? What did Jack have to do with Alice?

Jack carried on. "You do still remember her, don't you? The woman you'd been 'seeing' but whom you conveniently 'dumped' the moment my daughter became available? What was Alice to you by the way, your second string choice in case Sydney didn't pan out? Fuck-buddy insurance in case my daughter didn't come through? After all, no need to dump the girl you've got until you're sure you can get the next one, right?"

Jack's rat-a-tat string of questions was an attack designed to get Vaughn on the defence. It worked. Vaughn mentally reeled backwards, completely unprepared. Vaughn swallowed hard and forced himself to meet Jack Bristow's gaze.

"Mr. Bristow, I know how it looks - "

Jack saw no reason to even let him speak.

"How it looks is how it is. For a year you've been playing two women, leading my daughter on and for much of the time not telling her you were seeing someone else, whilst keeping Alice Weston attached without intimating that your eye had already wandered elsewhere. You were quite happy to continue doing just that until mere days ago when you were confident that my daughter was available – by the fact that she was wiling to play 'tonsil-hockey' with you amid the remnants of SD-6."

Vaughn flinched. This wasn't fair! That wasn't how things had happened. It wasn't like that. _He _wasn't like that. He held up an admonishing finger – _just hold it big guy_ – until he saw Jack Bristow toying with just how to snap it off. "Mr. Bristow, you're just not being fair!"

Jack was surprised at how angry he suddenly was. This screwed up little pisher was trying to defend the indefensible? The man couldn't even see what he'd done that was so very wrong? Something tightened in his chest. "That is your reasoned argument Mr. Vaughn? 'It's not fair'? I haven't given credence to that element in debate since I left the schoolyard."

Vaughn wished he could control the slight rattle in his voice. "Look, Alice and I were already through, at heart our relationship was already over."

"Really? Did she know that?" Jack stared the younger man down hard. "I've checked the woman's household bills - "

"What? Is that _legal_?"

" - and as of ten days ago she was still out shopping for bed-linen for the two of you, so excuse me if I don't share your beliefs." His gaze flicked over the younger man's face with disdain. Vaughn felt as though he'd been spattered with acid. "And I'm CIA Mr. Vaughn, I don't 'do' legal." Jack took a half step forward and Vaughn felt a sudden movement in his inside jacket pocket. Jack had taken his cell-phone. Vaughn suddenly felt horribly vulnerable - for a big man Jack Bristow was terrifyingly quick. "Shall I call her to get her view?" Jack indicated the phone in his hand, "or have you already wiped her number off your speed-dial?"

A stunned Vaughn could think of nothing to say – he tried to get the colouring in his face under control, and couldn't.

Jack continued speaking. "The fact is, Mr. Vaughn, that telling me your relationship with Alice Weston was 'already over' in no way excuses you. Because if it was over, why hadn't you ended it at some point previously? Either you're lying and it wasn't over, or you are telling the truth and you are a man who'd rather have anyone at his side than no-one at all. You were causing Alice Weston to waste her time on you, while from the comfort of what you already had you looked for something better."

"You've got me all wrong. I wouldn't do a thing like that. I'm not that kind of guy!" Vaughn's voice was a scattershot of outraged hurt.

"You did do a thing like that and you are precisely that kind of guy."

"Mr. Bristow, irrespective of whatever you think of me - "

Jack was caught between scorn and pity at the younger man's self-evasions. He cut across him ruthlessly.

"Whatever I think? Stop kidding yourself. There is no _doubt _what I think, I've made it clear: you are a weak man who is afraid to be alone, and in your selfishness you think it's a fine thing to deceive others." At these words Jack felt some emotion crunch up inside him, he ignored it, refusing to even look to see what it might have been or why he might have felt it. "Not only are you not good enough for my daughter Mr. Vaughn, but I can hardly think of whose daughter you might be good enough for."

For once Vaughn was desperate enough to not be diverted, his voice had an undertone of yelping injustice that made it sound almost boyish. "Whatever you think of me I am in love with Sydney and she is in love with me. I would never hurt her."

"Of course you wouldn't – she'd kill you." Well, Jack _hoped_ she would.

"Mr. Bristow, I did not two-time those women!" Vaughn felt compelled to defend himself. He was a man who loved having a partner, yes, he knew it. He was a man who didn't like to be alone, couldn't bare it in fact and he knew it, but hell, still … "I am not a cheater!"

"No, of course you're not. You're just a man who 'trades up'."

Jack's statement reverberated between them.

_Finally run out of self-justifications Mr. Vaughn?_

Jack's face reflected this thought, but not the others he was having, not the ones about how disappointed he was in Sydney. He'd never voice those thoughts, certainly not to Vaughn, and, he realised, there was no-one else to whom he could voice them.

Jack didn't 'do' friendship.

He didn't see the point of it. For him it was just a pale imitation of love, one involving a string of endless obligations in exchange for a very tepid reward.

He'd overheard the office gossip a few days ago. 'Vaughn's dumped his girlfriend and taken up with Sydney Bristow'. He heard about Sydney's reaction to Vaughn telling her he'd just broken up with Alice – that of a huge grin. He'd not believed it until he'd viewed the incident privately on office surveillance tapes. There was his daughter, splitting a grin as broad as a slice of melon at the news that an underpinning of another woman's life had been kicked away without warning.

Jack's bitter reverie was interrupted by Kendall's appearance. The pugnacious departmental senior packed Vaughn off to a Strategic Analysis seminar and Vaughn was grateful to go. Jack made his way to Technical Ops.

His slow stride gave him time to contemplate.

When he'd viewed that tape showing his daughter, his sense of let down and shame had been enormous. Shame and let down not just at Sydney but also at himself, at witnessing yet more proof of what a truly inadequate father he had been. Couples split up under difficult circumstances – he knew that, he had cause to know it more than most – but in a triangle was it too much to hope that the reaction of the 'victor' should reflect some adult acknowldgment of the cost to another? Despite her much vaunted empathy, Sydney's instant reaction had been a display of thoughtless glee.

He sifted it over in his mind. What could he say? That in some ways his daughter was immature? That she was volatile and could be high-handedly judgemental? That at times she clung to an almost childish certainty of right and wrong, of black and white, with not enough room for grey? Or could he say that things would have been different if only she'd had her mother for the emotional guidance that mothers did best and that he had not done at all?

And to choose Vaughn as she had, a man so beneath her! Jack reflected that Sydney always had been a poor judge of character. As he walked through the doors of Technical Ops, he thought of all the years of deception he'd suffered with Laura Bristow and supposed Sydney had inherited that particular flaw from him.

Sydney and Weiss quickly cornered Vaughn to ask how it had gone.

Vaughn couldn't disguise the fact that he was still breathing heavily from the conflict. How could he play it? He loved Syd, he didn't want her knowing her old man thought he was trash.

"Well, he didn't actually threaten to _kill_ me," he joked, his light tone hiding how near to the bone that was.

Weiss visually checked him over. "No contusions, no major trauma …" he shrugged, "hey, you lived, I'm impressed." He turned to Sydney, "no offence Syd, but your dad's a big dog with a bad bite."

Sydney laughed in relief, dimpling her cheeks. From Vaughn's reaction it had obviously gone well; she re-phrased that to herself – it had gone as well as it _could _have gone, after all, they were dealing with Dad.

It was only a while later that a bruising conversation with her father revealed just what Vaughn had meant when he'd mentioned the 'not threatening to kill me' part.

Vaughn had been telling the literal truth, but he'd conveniently used 'truth' to disguise reality.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7: Scandiaglio** - _probing actions to test and discover the opponent's nature._

Trapped on another continent, James Dodgson had started work immediately Sloane and Sark had left the room. Knowledge was power and she intended to amass what she could. Sitting before a laptop, she picked up the shapes on the Rambaldi papers, altered for different scale, provided 3-D capacity, and then flicked them about in various permutations till they fitted – and she did it all in her head. The papers made it clear that the artefacts would be largely held together by their interlinking magnetic fields, which were finely calibrated to not only hold together, but more importantly to magnify and transmute energy. She knew the energy factor had to be the reason for the thing's existence – as without that it was just 15th century Jenga.

There were 47 tiny pieces, lending themselves to a small cylindrical shape, small enough to hold in the palm of a hand – a wand.

_Harry Potter and the Wand of Doom – _she mentally regaled herself in a deep booming voice. She remembered Blond Guy - _and guess who's playing Draco Malfoy's even nastier elder brother!_

She tossed the shape around in her head again. _Looks like a 15th century light-sabre._

She knew she was working too fast for her own and Aaron's good – and Graham's too she reminded herself. If she hadn't been under such pressure she might have felt guilty that she hadn't given her husband's fate any real thought at all.

On occasions she looked up and found 'Mr. Sark' staring at her. Whenever she was caught under his glance, she felt the breath in her chest tighten and her own gaze skittered away.

_Shit, that kid's got a look that could ignite a gas can at 50 paces. _

She found his a disturbing regard. At times it was almost searingly direct, as though he was looking straight into her head. At others there was something almost tactile about it – she could almost feel it trawling over her. She felt embarrassed when she recalled that in the aquarium she'd first interpreted that very same gaze as that of a man intent upon helping her. His look was something she avoided now, it either burned her with heat or it burned her with cold.

"Bet when you make toast it either comes out barely brown or burnt to a crisp, right?"

He stared flatly at her.

"Yep," she muttered, "the gas can just blew up."

As the day drew on she resolutely told herself that she was not scared of Sark.

_Yeah right,_ another part of her retorted_, pants on fire anyone? Sure you're not scared, after all he's only the guy who was gonna torture you …_

It wasn't just his gaze and his demeanour which she found alarming, although both were bad enough, but also his youth. Being held in the grip of someone notably younger than she felt … un-natural. It was sinister. _He_ was sinister.

"You know, when you're making your little plans for world domination, do you sit there stroking a big white cat?"

No response.

Her day flew on in a reeling mix of resentment and some fear.

She flicked glances at him when she thought he wasn't looking. She decided it wasn't just his youth which bestowed him an extra menace –

_Not the bastard needs extra!_

- but also his intense, icy beauty that left him almost pretty. It made him seem other-worldly, somewhat inhuman. His face, with its stunning colouring of ivory, blue and gold, burned itself into the memory. It had something of an almost mathematical perfection about it, everything completely balanced. It's symmetry would have been almost unnerving if it wasn't relieved by one thing: his faintly crooked lower lip where a tiny sliver seemed missing from it. She had noted that he ran his finger across it when deep in thought, as though at some level its crookedness pre-occupied him.

"What happened to that?" She indicated his crooked lower lip as he unknowingly fingered it yet again. "Somebody finally get pissed enough at you to punch you in it?"

Surprised to find that she had spoken, it took Sark a few seconds to understand what she was talking about. "Hardly," he replied, looking her over as if considering whether it was worth continuing and then deciding what the hell, why not? "I got it at school, playing cricket." He clarified, "I was on the receiving end of a bad bounce."

When they'd taken her to her cell that night he'd unthinkingly held his arm out to her as she got up from her chair – a modern day Mr. Darcy toying with the idea that it might just be quicker to torture Elizabeth Bennett into compliance. He had acted with the seemingly certain confidence that she would accept. Instead she looked down at his proffered arm, her face a stunned expression of sarcastic disbelief. "Well you're a courteous little maniac, I'll give you that." Her voice took on a sneering tone. "Yep, Mr. Sark – The Lestat of Assassins – always polite to a person, right up until the second he kills them."

During her first conscious night after being taken, James lay cuffed to a cot in a tiny, locked cell; hemmed in by grey windowless walls and lit by a dim light that came in through a small watch-space cut into the door. Initially she'd quietly tugged at her bonds, looking always toward the door in case someone should see or hear, pulling with an increasing desperation; but she could not free herself and she realised there was no escape. Crouched, trapped in a filthy cell, friendless and alone - for the first time she understood that she was truly a prisoner.

The knowledge pressed in on her. She didn't even know where on the planet she was! It was hopeless!

Suddenly the emotion of the day rose up and engulfed her and although she was ashamed of it, she wept; stifling her sobs against the sleeves of her jacket so that she wouldn't be heard. She gave way to all the fear and despair she had repressed since being captured. Despair for herself and fear for her nephew.

She was overwhelmed by a wave of anger and resentment shot through with a dash of self-pity. She wasn't some super-spy, she was a woman who worked in a research lab for an engineering company! She wasn't prepared for this, she'd had no government training, no special ops preparations. She didn't even know how to shoot a gun! These guys were professionals! She felt as she had when she'd been six years old and had been picked on in the schoolyard by gangs of bigger kids, when she'd been filled with the simple outrage and anguish that: _it's not fair!_

'_It's not fair'?_ _Jeez, pull yourself together cry-baby! 'It's not fair' didn't work in the schoolyard and it won't work now!_

She pulled herself together by thinking of Aaron. She had to come up with a plan, she had to get them both out of this – he was depending on her!

She lay rigidly awake for hours, the dark pressing against her open eyes. She tried to think, straining to hear every sound, unable to dispel the terrified conviction that at any moment she was to be dragged out and killed or beaten, or worse, to see Aaron beaten. Eventually her body had rebelled and surrendered to its exhaustion, pulling the plug on her and plunging into sleep.

Unconscious to the world, she lay with the boneless inertia of a dead dog.

Yet even then she had no rest. She was tormented by dreams of being lost and alone in strange cities, with nameless responsibilities which she alone must carry. She squirmed in her sleep, wanting to wake but unable to do so.

She awoke in the morning confused and afraid, as much as by the dreams as by her momentarily panicked reaction to her environment. She felt sickened as the horrifying, stomach dropping reality of the situation sank in: it was all for real.

No way out.

She silently raged at herself. _This is all your fault! Aaron's in all this trouble because of you and you're damned smarts! Why couldn't you just be born normal like anyone else?_

She almost wished that Sark had drugged her to sleep the night before, that way she might have gotten some mindless rest.

Gradually over the next few days she acclimatised to the reality of her position, she would feel no further need to sob privately in her cell. They hadn't hurt her, they hadn't turned up with Aaron, they hadn't tried to rape her or in any way attack her. Her initial estimation had been correct, these guys were professionals, and so to them she was just someone who sat in the corner of the room and did a job. The place was a bit like a prisoner hotel.

Okay, she thought, so the room and board wasn't great, but she had fantastic room service: ten staff to one guest.

At one point she'd demanded to know if Aaron was alright, in response 'Mr. Sark' had dialled a number on his cell phone, spoke French into it and then, with the mouthpiece covered, held it to her ear. As he held the phone, his wrist was so close that she could smell his cologne. It disturbed her – that he actually wore cologne in circumstances such as this. It whispered of a contained self-possession too far beyond his years, of an old soul distilled into far too young a body.

_Creepy little bastard!_

Then she had heard Aaron speaking and she had felt almost eviscerated with relief. Aaron had sounded actually excited, not a bit frightened. Sark had hung up before she could speak.

The scent of Sark's cologne had lingered after the call had ended. It was a clean smell but there was nothing warm about it; she could only describe it as somehow 'distant', 'remote'. He smelled like a cold, still Winter's day.

He was still doing the staring thing. She'd catch him occasionally, regarding her as though she were some specimen on a slab. The first few times James had jerked her gaze away as before. But then … she'd stunned herself by staring flat back at him. Once she had even stuck her tongue out. It wasn't bravery, it was just that after an insanely pressured and draining interlude she had simply gotten too damn tired to be scared of him.

She stopped working the Rambaldi problem and started working her own, covertly watching those around her. What did she know about her captors? She had only met Rat-Guy once but she had no doubt whatsoever that he was capable of calmly ordering the deaths of all three of them prior to attending a pleasant evening at the Opera. But as for Blond Guy…?

James snuck another look at Sark. She was puzzled by him. She didn't consider he was on Sloane's leash at all, whatever Sloane might think. Why did she think that? She pondered it and then got it. It was the way he had intervened during her Torture-Lite exchanges with Sloane: with hindsight he had taken the steam out of the escalating showdown, getting them all back on track before anyone got seriously hurt.

Did that scary blond brat have his own agenda?

She watched as Sark stood far across the barely furnished space; she could hear him faintly as he spoke into a cell-phone, strolling to and fro as he addressed the listener.

She'd been watching him by turns all afternoon. British, cultivated, self-controlled and poised: despite his youth he radiated a sense of groomed authority. She could not stop digging away at the apparent duality he presented: at once civilized, almost aristocratic, yet also somehow primal – something focused and prowling.

An urbane monster?

He stopped moving as he listened to the voice down the other end of the line. He casually looked across at her and she jerked her gaze back to the lap top. He held the cell-phone away from his ear, his other hand over it blocking his clipped voice as he called out.

"Mr. Sloane would like an update. Have you anything for me Dr. Dodgson?"

"Sure junior, I gotta quarter in my pocket. Use it to phone your momma and tell her you'll be late home tonight."

She could have slapped herself. _Oh, great dumbass! Piss off the nice kidnapper why don't you?_

From across the wide space she would have thought he was staring her down, except he viewed her with all the interest of a man watching a snail race he didn't have a bet on. He lifted his cell-phone to his ear and spoke acerbically.

"The answer is a 'no'."

Across the room Sark heard Sloane's voice come through the phone. "Then is there anything we can do to enable her to go faster?"

Sark felt his jaw clench in irritation.

_The threat of 'no supper' tonight?_ _Withhold her pocket money?_ What had Sloane said – that she was either stupid or boldly brave? In Sark's opinion it was both.

He recalled the incident late yesterday when he'd been looking at her and she had put her tongue out at him. _Christ, but I'd only been looking! I've done plenty of illegal things in my life, but looking's not one of them! _

He flicked her a glance and considered her. With her scruffy, lamb-dressed-as-mutton appearance she had all the allure of a wet umbrella flung down to dry. If she would just cut out the sneering she would look ten times better! He surveyed her. _She's just the bad kid at the back of the class, the school rebel who cheeks the teacher, pays no attention, and then just for the hell of it gets top marks in a test anyway, just to show that she can. _

"Mr. Sark? Is there anything I can provide?" Sloane prompted.

Sark jolted. "Yes, you can send over a Bayou to English translator."

For once he rang off before even waiting to hear if there was a reply.

Looking at her, he wouldn't have been remotely surprised to find that she was filling the lap top by designing a next level for a computer game! Well, let her have her little jokes and sneers. He was confident that she was assimilating the answer. When she had it, he would take it off her.

Eyes narrowing in an unwilling curiosity, he approached her almost unwittingly.

Her face held that scrunched up expression he was becoming familiar with – half contempt, half defensiveness. She was fiddling about with the laptop, not looking at him, but instead humming a vague tune. He wasn't entirely sure, but he thought it just might have been a hideously inept rendition of _Zadoc the Priest_.

"Doctor, are you aware that you're humming to yourself?"

She stopped and stared ahead into the mid-distance, shrugging, thinking about it fractionally before returning her attention to the laptop.

"Yeah, so? Are you aware that you have freckles?"

Sark's jaw would have dropped if he hadn't already had it clamped shut.

_Freckles?_

Irritation fought with amazement. There she was, an Alice yanked clean through the looking glass, and yet she had taken the worst of it straight on the chin and had stayed on her feet. She was even fighting back! He begrudged admitting it, but in her own way she was almost an impressive little thing.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: Trovar Di Spada** - _the art of placing your sword against the opponent's without touching his blade, so that yours will have the advantage of a lever at the moment they meet._

In the basement of the L.A. CIA after her recent raid on Shipman airfield to gather intel on the 'Caplan' kidnapping – trying to trace Sark's flight plan when he'd transported his hostages - Sydney Bristow stood before her mother, the two women separated by the invisible wall of glass.

Sydney was sobbing. "Mom, Dad hates Vaughn, and then Vaughn lied to me about how badly it had gone with Dad. _Why_ does Dad hate him, Mom, _why_?"

"Sydney, I'm your mother and I love you," _but right now I'd happily slap your face off if it would stop you whining_, "but I don't know what's going on inside your father's head, and I can't tell you."

Irina sometimes wondered how she kept her honey-sweet tone going when actually what she really wanted to do was metaphorically send Sydney to her room.

She had just lied of course. It was totally obvious to Irina what Jack was thinking.

_What's going on inside Jack's head is the recognition that Vaughn's needy. That Vaughn's the human equivalent of a weak climbing plant that needs something to wrap its tendrils around to give itself shape and support. That he'll always be a drain on you Sydney and not a partner. And Jack's right._

Sydney sobbed on. "I feel as though my whole life has been one long round of people deceiving me." Sydney's voice ran on as her mother regarded her with increasing exasperation from behind a display of nodding maternal support. "I just don't know if I can trust anymore …." More sniffling sobs and words tumbling out. "I just don't know, will I ever find anyone …" Irina tuned out. Yep, it was another long litany of _me, me, me_.

This wasn't the first time Irina had rued the glass which prevented the delivery of a good, hard smack when it was needed.

During her captivity Irina had been landed with a lot of time on her hands, a lot of time for unaccustomed introspection. Trapped in a glass cell with limited distractions and risking only the necessary contact with Sark, there hadn't been much else to do but think and reflect back, pondering on how things had happened in her life and why.

She had never allowed herself to ponder on how things might have been different.

In that time her thoughts had returned repeatedly to her daughter. She now watched Sydney from behind the glass, taking in the sniffling and the self-pity. Sometimes she was unable to fathom the girl at all. No, she corrected herself sharply, not a girl but a young woman. And not so young anymore, either. Sydney was in her late twenties, an age by which Irina herself had been a mother, an age by which many people were finding direction and fulfilment in their lives, but seemingly not Sydney. Sydney still behaved immaturely, trapped in a cycle of unhealthy introspection and self-centredness with a sugar coating of 'goof-ball'. Their current 'conversation' was just another example. As Sydney sniffled on in front of her, Irina nodded sympathetically, not really listening to any of it. Why should she? She'd heard it all before.

"And Mom … but since Danny, I've just not known what to feel anymore, that maybe its not safe to feel. And now when I have, Vaughn's lied to me!"

The words leapt out of Irina's mouth before she even knew they were coming. "Sydney Anne Bristow! Are you actually trying to compare the murder of Danny Hecht with Vaughn's scared, little white lie?" Irina had been shocked out of her reverie. If she'd had a kitchen table to thump on, she would have thumped; she had meant what she said.

"Oh, dry your eyes!" Irina was genuinely exasperated. She felt like a vexed mother upbraiding her teenaged daughter, except that Sydney wasn't a teenager, she was a grown woman who could see 30 coming up. Irina stilled at the sudden recognition: Sydney was a teenaged 30 year old and that was a queasy, unappealing mix.

She wondered what the CIA spent its money on when training its agents. Classes in Introspection, Self-absorption, and Self-pity? Sydney looked so like her, in some ways _was _so like her, but Sydney's brilliance and fire were awash in a sea of untrammelled, soap-opera emotion that she, Irina, had been forced to walk away from aged 17.

Even as her mind strove to analyse the situation, Irina's voice barked on.

"Sydney – it's times like this that I most regret having left you. It hurts me to say this, because it'll hurt you to hear it and it'll remind us both of just how remiss I was in leaving, but if I'd been there for you, you wouldn't have turned out like this!"

Irina ordered herself to 'shut up'. She told herself she was undermining all the work she'd put in on turning Sydney against Jack, portraying herself as the warm, sympathetic mother to Jack's stern, distant paterfamilias. Well … to hell with that! She surged on.

"Look at you. You're twenty eight and you're whining like a girl over some boy at school who was mean to her in the halls!" Jesus, she hissed to herself, _Jack's done a lousy job raising our child! _"You came here ostensibly to talk about a case involving a missing scientist and a kidnapped child – serious issues Sydney - but within minutes it's about you and your boyfriend? Do you have any sense of perspective?"

The two women stood either side of the invisible barrier, each shocked by Irina's torrent of words. There were long seconds of embarrassed silence and each glared away from the other in an attempt to govern her own thoughts.

Irina found herself boring holes in the wall and, of all things, suddenly feeling sorry for Jack. She nearly laughed out loud at the thought, because just moments earlier she'd been blaming him for ruining Sydney, but it hadn't been all his fault. After all, it would have taken the two of them to successfully wrangle a wilful creature like Sydney into adulthood! Her sudden humour left her and she felt a dark bitterness, because it hadn't been all Jack's fault, a lot of it had been hers.

If only she had stayed, if only she had been there, if only she had put her family before ideology. Better still, when Jack had brought that rat-bastard work colleague Sloane round to dinner, if only she hadn't listened to him when he'd started talking about Rambaldi and instead had just killed him on the spot! Yeah, offed him right there, throat chopped him to death on the dining room rug! Okay, so she would have revealed herself as a Russian agent and dinner would have been ruined, but Jack would have been cool, they -

_If, if, if!_

She flinched in annoyance. She knew there was a reason she hadn't dwelled on 'might have been'.

She shook her head to drive away the thoughts and her mind lighted again upon Jack. She was struck by something almost quizzically comic. Poor Jack, having to manhandle Sydney through adolescence and having nowhere near the right tools to do it, she almost grinned at the thought. Forbidding, austere, reserved Jack having to deal with a flighty Sydney; it would have been like an elephant being spooked by a mouse! No, Irina had to fully admit that the way Sydney had turned out hadn't been all Jack's fault, some of it was Irina's own. Her duties may have lain elsewhere, but her responsibilities and love had lain with Sydney and Jack. She should have confessed everything to Jack, trusted that the total love Jack held for her, Laura Bristow, would have been transferred to her, Irina Derevko. She should have believed that Jack would have found the strength to rise above himself, to conquer his wrath at her betrayal when he realised that Irina – the woman who was his wife – had risked everything in choosing him and their child over all else. She should have had faith.

But Irina Derevko hadn't done faith – only Laura Bristow had the strength for faith.

Across the barrier of glass a tense Sydney – arms folded, glaring away into a corner - wrestled with her own thoughts. Her sudden flare of anger had dissipated to reveal feelings of utter shame. She flushed red with self-mortification. Her mother was right. Faced with an extreme danger to others what had she done? - she had behaved with an utterly blind self-centredness, concentrating instead on her own petty issues. And, oh God, but to have ever attempted to compare Danny's terrible death with Vaughn's pathetic little lie!

_When did I become such a total jerk?_

Staring down at the floor she compressed her full lips, trying to swallow a golf-ball of grief whilst blinking back tears.

_Oh stop crying! _she told herself_. Because who are you crying for? Danny? Vaughn? Mom? Or just yourself? _

Okay so she'd had a bad life – no make that a really bad life – but there were others who'd had worse. Far worse.

She wanted to look at her mother and ask for forgiveness, for her mother to tell her it was alright. But why? So she could fall back on yet another round of provoked emotionalism? Hadn't her mother just told her to pull herself together? And her mother had been right.

Each woman looked up at the same moment, each had eyes which glittered with unshed tears brought on by might-have-beens and self-recriminations. Each paid the other the respect of ignoring the fact.

When Sydney had come to her mother she had told Irina about the events surrounding Dr. James Dodgson. She was hoping Irina might impart some intel that would help. Sydney swallowed hard and got back onto that topic. She said the first thing that came to mind.

"Mom, what's Sark got to do with it?"

Irina shook her head for a second, buying herself time to take the tremble out of her voice. "He's probably working with Sloane." She got her thickened, shaky tone back under control. "But then Sark often has his own agenda."

Irina knew that Sydney was weakened by her need to believe that her mother was fundamentally good, and that this clouded Sydney's field-judgement, but it was something Irina exploited and was going to exploit now.

Just for a moment, she despised herself.

_So? Get your head back in the game – get information but don't give any. Sydney's not the one with the prospect of execution hanging over her!_

She gave that head tipped sideways 'considering' look that had Sydney so fooled. "What's Dr. Dodgson's field of expertise?" she enquired, as if she didn't already know. "Do you have any leads on why they would need her in particular?"

Sydney answered and both women were grateful for the chance to leave their tortured thoughts for a few minutes and to retreat into the safety of talking business. After listening to Sydney describe the abduction and give a run down on Dodgson's known research, Irina interjected with a seemingly innocent prompt. "Any leads on where they went?"

After her daughter had gone, Irina cast her mind back over the conversation. So, they knew about Sark having kidnapped Dodgson, and they knew they'd gone to Switzerland, but these were incidentals. What stood out to Irina was that in her moment of emotional need her daughter had pulled herself clear of her inner turmoil by turning to the subject of Sark.

She squashed the inner voice that said darkly: _yes, the way you retreated to the subject of Jack. _

Stubbornly ignoring her inner voice, Irina sat on the floor with her back against the stone wall and drew her knees up before her. She thought about the past.

She thought about Sark.

She felt that it would be no surprise if Sydney were secretly fascinated by him, even if so secretly she did not realise it; after all, he was a fascinating creature.

Irina had first met the little boy who had become Mr. Sark through her involvement on the Russian Project Birthday, after her escape from the U.S.. 'Project Birthday'. Typical of the Communist Government she thought, so unimaginative that they could barely be bothered re-naming the project they had stolen. Project Christmas: Project Birthday – so bureaucratic, so uninspired. The project had run on for several years, and then – Sark.

Upon first hearing that a child of four were to enter the programme, she had argued against it.

'_His mind won't be formed enough to take the training, it could damage him.'_

'_So? If the boy dies, if any of the children die, it will add to the fund of knowledge. Besides, think of the child's genetic inheritance. Won't it be interesting to see how he fares?' _

From his files Irina had noted who his father was – Andrei Lazarey. As soon as she saw the name she had known why the authorities were fascinated, why they had selected that little boy and taken their last chance to shove him through the program as the funding was running out. The Lazareys were of an ancient lineage, one still secretly regarded in Russia with a superstitious awe that verged almost on the religious. Irina guessed that inducing the four year old into Project Birthday, almost deliberately testing him to destruction, was partly motivated by the communist elite's almost primitive urge to uncover whether the family really had been in any way singular. The blood-line represented by the Lazareys may only have been a cadet branch of the family, but in the USSR 'Romanov' was still a dirty word.

Was that why Lazarey had given up his son so easily, to curry favour with the authorities? Lazarey had been a diplomat – wealthy and privileged by Russian standards – but a man could always want more.

If his aim had been to remove Sark from him, he couldn't have found a better way to do it. For excluding outside influences, Project Birthday had been as secure and safe as a Witness Protection program.

She rolled her head back against the cool stone wall, tilted her jaw, and started to signal to Sark. From talking to Sydney she had things to tell him about the CIA's tracking of the kidnap victims, and perhaps she could pique his interest with news of Sydney and Vaughn and their burgeoning relationship?

Pique his interest? Why not? Because as she wondered what Sydney really thought of Sark, she sometimes wondered what Sark really thought of Sydney.

In any case, if nothing else, she certainly wished to know how Dr. Dodgson was progressing in her endeavours.

She cast no shadow against the floor as she signalled, the harsh overhead lighting saw to that. Whatever the time for everyone else, it was always High Noon for Irina Derevko.

A continent away, Sark stepped out of the shower in his rented apartment. He'd spent the day at the warehouse where James Dodgson was imprisoned and now he was scrubbing off the grime he associated with the place, readying for dinner with Sloane when he would report back on progress.

The only thing he wore on towelling down was a titanium wristwatch. Originally a chunky diver's watch, specified to withstand deep sea pressures, it had been further upgraded to be bomb-proof, fire-proof, sonic sock resistant, and cased to withstand electro-magnetic pulses, it also had a micro transceiver installed under the bezel. The upgrades had cost in excess of one hundred thousand dollars. It was hardly a beautiful thing, but he admired the serviceability of its basic design, and although he knew it didn't pass muster as a dress watch, he never took it off.

Having hitched a white towel loosely about his hips, and using another to roughly towel-dry his hair, the mirrored bathroom wall showed Damp!Sark. (Okay reader – that's what I _wanted_ to write, but as I have to do it properly, let's rewind and do it again.)

Having hitched a white towel loosely about his hips, and using another to roughly towel-dry his hair, the mirrored bathroom wall showed a young man with a sleek, smooth musculature, his hair and skin tones variations on ivory and gold, a background against which his cobalt eyes were all the more stunning. He was a thing of balanced beauty.

Almost feline.

He moved across the bathroom like a cat across a rooftop.

And like a cat his full weight and determination only became apparent when he chose to pounce. Before he struck he seemed almost delicate, something only really designed for decoration. It was only when the attack came that the blood-instinct, speed and ruthlessness showed. Also like a cat – a street cat - he had survived in an emotional vacuum, a place of no affection or feeling, getting by on whatever glancing scraps others just casually threw out, learning to live without until 'living without' had become normal. He was not without a dark appreciation of it though. Loveless yet beautiful, the combination allowed him to seduce his way out of difficult situations.

If pressed he'd admit that he secretly enjoyed seduction, he got a sneaky kick out of the sheer manipulation and deceit involved: it was emotional revenge, and revenge was always one of his favourite games. Indeed, when seducing a man, the manipulative power-play was pretty much the only turn-on for him.

One of his few points of pride was that you could never accuse him of being a nice boy.

Vengeful and cool-blooded or not, when he picked up Irina's message abruptly beating through his signalling device – his wristwatch - he still felt as though she'd walked in on him in the bathroom.

Still in the bathroom a few minutes later, Sark reflected that Irina's message had informed him of the CIA's knowledge of his flight plan to Europe – useful to know, but not overly alarming. What had caught Sark's attention more was the news that CIA agents Michael Vaughn and Sydney Bristow had finally become lovers.

Closing the exchange by signalling that all was well regarding Irina's other query – Dr. Dodgson's work - he thought one thing: thank God Irina was thousands of miles away and couldn't hear him laughing.

What? The Prom Queen and Captain Cardboard had finally gotten some? Sydney, a woman who straight-armed life and Vaughn, a man who wanted to hide away from it? They were made for each other! Ignoring the bathroom mirror – despite his beauty and love of fine things, Sark lacked vanity - he dropped down into a chair, towelled his arms and shoulders dry, and astounded himself by barking with genuine laughter.

The part of his mind which was permanently on run-time, analysing himself and his surroundings, noted that his response of amusement was utterly authentic. He was truly not hurt by the news. Which was surprising really, he reflected, given how he had once felt towards Sydney Bristow.

Sark was a man who had no problems admitting when he was sexually attracted to a woman, and he'd been wildly attracted toward Sydney, but now he could see that there had been something else lurking there too. From the safe vantage of hindsight he could admit that he'd once had a world-class crush on Sydney Bristow, a crush he could finally confess to only because at some point he must have gotten over it. He knew he'd gotten over it because before the news of Sydney and Vaughn would have hurt him, but now it just amused him.

He was still chuckling as he left the bathroom.

So she was shagging Vaughn? Well see if he cared! 

He dressed: black silk shirt, black knitted silk tie, black Armani suit; his shoes hand-made black leather oxfords from John Lobb of London. Black, black, black. His appearance was given interest by subtle variations in texture and tone rather than by colour. He traditionally dressed in sombre colouring, it had become somewhat of a sartorial signature, that and his immaculately tailored single breasted suits. Unless deliberately dressing down or wearing more practical assault clothes for a job, going tie-less and having the top button of his shirt undone was Sark's one concession to casual. He knew that to be immaculately presented, to dress in classically understated, formal, bespoke tailoring, was a necessary counterweight to his obvious youth; it enabled his appearance to project authority.

For him perception was everything. You wanted people to treat you with respect? – then you had to look like you deserved it.

No-one ever thought to ask why he traditionally wore black or other dark colours, he supposed others simply imagined it to be some affectation on his part. Well let them think that, it saved telling them the truth. Sark wore black because if he got into a fight or a shoot out then it wouldn't show the blood – his own or anyone else's. Initially Sark had worn black when he had gone out to deal trouble or when he was expecting to get it. The 'black days' had numbered ever greater as time passed, now he just wore black automatically.

Closing the apartment door as he left for dinner, he surprised himself by feeling almost light hearted. It was as though the news about Sydney and Vaughn had enabled him to leave behind some old baggage he no longer wanted and hadn't even realised he still been carrying around.

An ocean away, Sydney Bristow faced her father in a quiet corner of the office. He was calmly explaining to her how he thought she might want to review her level of emotional maturity, and her relationship with Vaughn. As usual in such matters, Jack had retreated to addressing his daughter as though she were a CIA Tactical Awareness sub-group. 

"Oh shut up Dad, not you too, I've just had that from Mom!"

Honestly, did both her parents think she was a complete jerk?

_Yes,_ sniped her inner voice, _and so do you, so shut up and get off your high horse_.

She stumbled off leaving Jack to his thoughts.

Jack was stumbling himself, through a moment of confusion.

What? _Oh shut up Dad, not you too, I've just had that from Mom!_ He mooted over his daughter's words. Irina had been remonstrating with Sydney about Sydney's behaviour? Irina had jeopardised all her work of cozying up to Sydney at his expense and dealt out some maternal home-truths?

Just what was going on?

Jack wandered casually over to a work station, logging on to the surveillance monitor of Irina's cell. He could see her quite clearly on the closed-cap link. He looked with every appearance of dispassion at the screen, only his mind in a turmoil over how he'd explain it if anyone casually enquired as to why he was watching.

There she was, long hair, slender figure, serene poise, and patently still capable of dealing out a comprehensive telling-off to their daughter. A more than twenty year gap and she was still totally recognisable as the woman he'd loved. 

Down in her cell Irina ignored the camera, she was still thinking on the subject of her protégé, Sark.

Such a melange of the enigmatic and the half–known.

She had some of the answers to the question of who Sark really was but she suspected no-one had all of them, not even Sark. He couldn't, he didn't know the things she hadn't told him. He was not even really aware of his own surname. He knew nothing of his royal ancestry, or of the far greater secret she had held about him for a short while now. Having extracted – more like _stolen_ - him from Project Birthday aged 11 and then installed him in an English Public School, she had almost eradicated his full awareness of being Russian.

When she had left her Homeland and taken the boy with her – after all there was nothing for him in Russia and besides, he was an asset - she had chosen to ensconce him in England because it seemed the obvious place.

Under his Project Birthday training he had acquired many languages. The children were tutored in languages by defectors, people whose accents were genuine. The defectors came from many countries and many backgrounds, but it was noted that most of the British ones were disaffected members of that country's ruling class. The little boy who became Sark, one of the greatest remaining scions of Russian Nobility, had been taught to speak English by England's aristocrats. The irony was not lost upon Irina.

His accent had given him a head start in being acceptable in England, and Irina saw no reason to waste it. It had pleased her to place him in a prestigious English boarding school, a private establishment in Wiltshire, where he was given an education not only first rate academically, but also one fitting for a gentleman; a place where not only his intellect but also his neglected social skills could be polished.

He had worked for Irina in the holidays.

In taking him she had never really thought her motives through, and on the few occasions the truth about it did pop into her head, she suppressed it. She hadn't 'stolen' him, she hadn't 'taken' him – it hadn't really been anything to do with him being an asset – the truth was she'd been trying to _save_ him. She didn't like to think of it because what she had been trying to save him from – the worst effects of Project Birthday – were the very things she had done to him: Project Birthday was really all her fault. Without her, the Russians would never have gotten their hands on it.

Putting him in an English Public School, surrounding him with the sons of English gentlemen and having him taught by English eccentrics, had been a desperate effort to blur his laser-sharp edges. To swerve him back into some semblance of humanity. Knowing it was too late for him to escape the world of espionage, in his 'English' years she had calculatedly plunged him from school-boy cricket to field assassinations and back again, like a blade tempered between hot and cold as she'd tried to beat him into some other, less vicious, shape.

She didn't think she had entirely succeeded, but she hoped she might have, just a little.

By the time he had officially left school at 16, called to his place at Irina's side, his birth-right had bestowed upon him a gifted intellect whilst his various schoolings had added the skills and detachment of an assassin, the social poise of a political animal, the vocal delivery of an aristocrat and the manners of a gentleman. At age 16 he was sprung fully formed upon the world - already Mr. Sark.

Sometimes she told herself she didn't tell that fabulous creature what she knew of him because he wouldn't believe her. Well, he wouldn't believe at least one of the things she had to say, she had always sensed that Sark was somewhat resistant to the lure of the Rambaldi Prophesies, deep down he just loved the gadgets. At other times she told herself that she didn't tell him because he actually might believe her - and then what would happen? How would the controlling, action-orientated, self-contained Sark react to being informed that he was part of Rambaldi's inescapable, pre-destined web?

She could imagine Sydney's phrase for it: _he'd freak out, that's what._

Thousands of miles distant, Sark moved to the underground car park of his apartment block.

He didn't give a single thought to Sydney, Vaughn, or Irina – well, maybe a little to Irina. He didn't have the time to, even if he'd had the inclination. As the self-determined Mr. Sark drove from the building in a rented black Merc drop-top his expression hardened: tonight wasn't about Sydney or Irina, tonight was all about getting Arvin Sloane to believe that all was going to plan, that Mr. Sark wasn't having difficulties with that exasperating creature he'd come to think of as That Bloody Woman – Dr. James Dodgson.

He drove off, gunning the gears in frustration.

_Christ, that bloody woman should come with her own users' instruction manual! _


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9: Schivar Di Vita** - _the action of voiding the opponent's sword by moving the body out of line._

Sark met Sloane over dinner in a discretely expensive restaurant: crystal, silver, linen, attentive but unobtrusive service, wines and food of a fine standard. The tables were spaced far enough apart to allow the moneyed clientele to hold private conversations without fear of indiscretion. There was no ambient music, the whisper of wealth was the only background noise required.

Sark had left two of his crew on guard over James Dodgson. She had a choice of dinner menu – greasy burgers, diet coke and what the Americans termed 'fries' but which Sark always thought of as 'chips'. The choice was with or without ketchup.

The two men occupied a quiet booth, having already ordered. If another diner paid attention to them – and none did – they would have appeared to be two successful businessmen, the elder graciously imparting experience and knowledge to the younger.

In the cocoon of the booth they conversed.

"We are in the process of building Rambaldi's greatest weapon," Sloane intoned, almost breathless with respect.

Sark kept his half-smile in place whilst ruthlessly suppressing the urge to slam down his fork._ Sure, the 'greatest weapon' since the last and until the next!_ _When is this all going to end?_

He let none of his scepticism show as Sloane's eyes glittered in the ambient light – to an observer, Sark simply displayed his usual polite attention. Sloane went on, narrating the story of his grand Rambaldi Odyssey. Sark stopped listening and wondered at how intelligent people like Sloane, and particularly Irina, could have let themselves be sidetracked into a 30 year scavenger hunt. Sometimes he felt a great affinity with Jack Bristow's hard headed assessment: _cut the Rambaldi crap. _

He caught a glimpse of himself in a far-off mirror. A young man, slightly bored but successfully hiding it: blond, blue-eyed, beautifully dressed and impeccably mannered. He felt a jolt of annoyance at finding James Dodgson's description of him ribboning through his mind – _Mr. Sark, the Lestat of Assassins – _yep, scrupulously polite to all, right until the moment he killed them.

He stiffened with a slight prickle of annoyance at the memory of her contempt. Well, at least from this distance he couldn't see any bloody _freckles_ in the mirror!He found himself grinding his jaw slightly. _ Freckles? – I do not have any sodding freckles!_

He watched Sloane ramble on, his annoyance heightening. Christ, why did the man always look in need of a good shave? Regarding him from behind his mask of polite attention, Sark wondered for the first time exactly when it was that the younger Arvin Sloane had become this grimy souled old man; eaten up from inside by his own lust for power.

_Grimy souled – where did you get that from Sarkey? _He thought. _You know you don't run to poetry._

With his expression of courteous interest still in place, Sark found himself weighing up Sloane's scars. The faint, slight run up one cheek where a knife had got him years ago, most obviously the scar where one finger had been re-attached following SD-6's run-in with McKenas Cole. In comparison, physically Sark was relatively unscarred, the major exception being an unpleasant little gash two inches above his left knee. He wasn't really aware of it, but he did carry worse scars, on the inside where no-one could see.

Sloane was still talking, in fact he'd never stopped.

"This small device which Dr. Dodgson is working on – obviously just a test but important enough in itself – should tell us if she is capable of assembling the much larger Rambaldi devices. How is she progressing?"

Sark gave himself a rallying pep-talk. _Okay Sarkey, remember Sark's Rule Number 2: when in doubt, lie arse off._

That rule followed Sark's Rule Number 1: never be in doubt.

Sark had already game-planned his response to this question and had decided that whatever he told Sloane, it was not going to be the truth: that he had no clear idea where James Dodgson was up to and that the intervening days had been pure hell. As he sat in the booth he recalled that his first instinct had been to reject Sloane's baby-sitting plan, he knew now that he should have gone with that instinct and not rationalised it into something elseOnce over her worst fears and apprehensions James Dodgson had displayed an unfailing knack of finding the point of weakness – and hitting it. God, Sark thought, if only their position's weren't already set as adversaries she'd have made a wonderful ally. She had a sneering tone, a tongue that could clip a hedge, and she _owned_ the last word.

He bitterly acknowledged that when it came to verbal combat, she was an opponent as good as himself. A sneaky inner voice contradicted him – _she's not as good as yourself Sarkey, she's better!_

His mouth compressed in chagrin at the thought.

She already had his crew verbally whupped, they were actually beginning to flinch whenever she addressed them. He recalled her sneering reaction to one of them mooting his role in a 'high-class' drug deal.

"A _high-class_ drug deal?" her Bayou drawl had rung out, "ain't that an oxymoron?" She had looked the men up and down, obviously considering them to be complete idiots, "with the accent on the 'moron'?"

Sark had begun to coldly rebuke her.

"What?" she'd interrupted him, "you're gonna tell me I'm 'beyond belief'? I think the phrase you're lookin' for, Baby-Boy, is 'beneath' it."

Baby fucking Boy? 

No wonder her abridged name of 'Dodge' had stuck with her. It summed her up. With her quick, nippy mind he couldn't catch up with her. If he moved to land an intellectual blow on her he found she wasn't there, she'd already swerved on – dodged him.

She'd kept jeering at his pristine appearance. He'd dropped a pen on the floor and had bent to pick it up, only to have her cat-call, "Whooh – now don't you bend down like that honey – you might rumple your suit."

"I think you'll find I have at least a dozen more, Doctor."

"Yeah, I heard Hermit crabs changed their shells a lot."

Hermit crab! Hermit crab? What the fuck was that all about? 

When selecting her minders for tonight he'd purposefully chosen two who didn't speak English to ensure that she couldn't provoke them into beating her head in. He knew perfectly well she didn't speak any language other than English – well, she spoke something that passed for English.

He sipped his merlot and fought down his irritation, but even holding the wine glass brought on the instance of the recent occasion when she'd refused to drink because the glass they'd given her was dirty.

"And yeah," she'd sang out, "I am fully aware that stubbornness is a failing 'a mine."

He recalled how he had responded with a tight smile. "Actually Doctor, comparatively speaking I had stubbornness listed as one of your virtues."

Sark had congratulated himself on having the last word for once, unfortunately he'd congratulated too soon.

"Whooo!" she had called out mockingly, "strike one for Mr. Sark! Well, if that boy ain't finally getting up to speed." She had regarded him derisively. "Think I'll hold a small service of Thanksgivin' in honour."

He had surprised himself by trying to engage with her on some other, social, level. Almost as though he'd been trying to cut through the thickets between them, though God knows why he'd even wanted to. Preparing for a meeting once he'd changed his suit and had held up two ties, asking her opinion. "Black tie? Blue tie?"

She'd looked down at her own clothing, rejecting his advance with a shield of sarcastic disbelief. "Oh puhleeze. Do I look like someone who should get the casting vote on style?"

In the opulent gloom of the restaurant Sark placed his wine glass upon the linen tablecloth, through sheer will suppressing the tremor of annoyance in his hand.

_Christ, no wonder her husband is through with her - the bloody woman!_

He knew there was no point in physically hurting her – doing so would just panic her, slow her mind down – besides, she was so much smaller than he that it felt somehow unsavoury to even consider it. With the lack of any other option, he'd fallen back on the only other tool at his disposal: threats to the hostages. He had started with descriptions of what he would do to the husband.

"Fine," she'd shrugged, "go ahead, bastard's cheatin' on me anyhow."

Sark had closed his eyes, could he get any edge with this woman?

He had opened them to find her coldly staring him down.

"But if you touch my nephew," she had spat, "I'll never fuckin' help you, and you know it." She had grinned nastily. "Just out of sheer stubbornness you understand?"

He was sure it was a bluff. Put the kid in front of her, douse him with petrol and threaten to strike a match? - she'd co-operate alright. But not only would that be deeply unpleasant, it would be counterproductive, it would be inefficient.

_And I don't do inefficient_.

It would be inefficient because although he was sure it would get immediate short-term co-operation, it would engender a very different mid to long term response. A tongue that could clip a hedge? Shit, he wouldn't be a clipped hedge, he'd be fucking topiary if he ever hurt the kid. And that would be the least of it, he'd then be forced to kill her to stop her brilliant mind from devising a way to kill him. And a dead Doctor was absolutely not what he wanted.

Besides, douse a little kid with petrol and threaten to light a match? – he didn't fucking _want_ do it, inefficient or not!

So where had that left him? As she did not care about the husband, and he could not touch the nephew, and he did not dare hurt her, that left him with … nothing. He was playing a round of high stakes poker with an empty hand and no money. Great.

No, he certainly wasn't going to tell Sloane that it had been one of his worst times since he had been initially delivered up into Project Birthday. Bringing his first contact with 'Project Birthday' back to mind made him wince. Even now, years later, he still felt embarrassed for his four year old self, at how shining faced and eager he had been on that first day; willingly racing up the steps and into the belly of the beast.

Because he'd overheard the word 'birthday' he had thought he was going to be given a present.

"Mr. Sark?"

Sloane's prompt got Sark's game face on. The one thing Sark had in this particular poker round was his conviction that James Dodgson had already cracked the Rambaldi problem. He knew it because she no longer bothered to keep up even the pretence of using the laptop, which meant she was confident she already had her bargaining chip: that she had the solution. That was the line he was going to take with Sloane.

"In response to your question I feel confident that Dr. Dodgson fears my authority," – _my arse she does _– "and is co-operating."

"Yes," nodded Sloane, "and by the way, my congratulations on your efficient method of handling the Schreiber problem; executing him in front of Dr. Dodgson certainly proved a point to her I hope."

Sark took another sip of his wine, gaining time. How much did Sloane really know about the exact motivation for that particular incident? "Thank you," he responded, "I felt you'd appreciate the economy of the matter. The man was attempting to defraud us and so had to die, I simply utilised his death to act as an encouragement to Dr. Dodgson."

Sark hoped that Sloane hadn't realised that his killing of the crooked German bond-trader had been an act of sheer desperation on Sark's part. He had not only hoped to scare James in to line, but her sneering disrespect to him had begun to erode his standing within his own crew and had necessitated that he re-establish command and control. He'd done it with a show of blasé brutality. He'd easily gotten his crew back in order, he wasn't so sure about James.

He'd conducted the interrogation in German so that although James would have a clear idea of what was going on, she wouldn't be exposed to the full horror of it. For some reason he hadn't wanted her going through the sheer hell of having to understand every word the poor bastard said when he started pleading for his life.

_Because that would have been an unnecessary step, and I don't do unnecessary steps._

He recalled how even though the language barrier had spared her the worst, she had still screwed her eyes shut and clamped her hands over her ears, almost screaming herself, unable to bear it.

So much for a lack of empathy.

He uncomfortably realised that her reaction had been harder for him to bear than the pleadings of the man he'd shot.

"I feel confident that Dr. Dodgson will shortly be able to furbish us with something concrete," he confirmed.

"As she should, after all, she's had almost three days."

James' three days versus Sloane's thirty years? Sark decided that Sloane was an unreasonable bastard.

"I've decided to give her until this time tomorrow," Sloane continued. "I expect you to acquaint her with the time frame. If she has nothing by then, she is inadequate to the greater task."

Sark knew there was no need to enquire what would happen to her if she were deemed 'inadequate'.

Sloane paused his laden fork in mid-air and considered the situation. "I sense that Dr. Dodgson is infinitely capable of succeeding, even by tomorrow afternoon, but that she may require a little … encouragement. I suggest you start with the child."

Having issued Sark orders to torture a four year old in front of his aunt, Sloane slowly bit into the morsel poised before him and raised his eyebrows in a silent acknowledgement of its excellence. Having dealt with what he saw as the necessary unpleasantness of business, Sloane spent the rest of dinner in agreeable discourse, comparing various interpretations of _Tosca_.

Across town with a gut queasily trying to digest 'dinner' James sat, silently berating herself.

_How could I be so stupid as to clue Sark in that I care for Aaron? _

She determined that the next time that cold-assed, blond bastard came round, she would resolutely stay off the subject of her nephew.

_Make like you just don't care! Not normally a problem for you! _She told herself. _He'll kill him! Sark is ruthless!_

She recalled Sark executing the German guy. She hadn't really believed that Sark would do it. She was sure he was fundamentally just bluffing, that there would be a beating, some pain inflicted, but no death. She didn't know why but she had convinced herself that there was something essentially civilised about Sark. Some aspect of him that she could have reached and connected with.

Sark hadn't even blinked before he'd shot the man.

That poor man, begging for his life even though he was obviously going to die. Even with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears, she had not been able to stand it. She had barely been able to stifle her own screams, wanting to shriek – _for chrissakes just kill him!_ - to end the horror.

She glared across at her two Neanderthal dinner companions. She would have insulted them to relieve the tension, except that she couldn't - they didn't speak English.

An hour after finishing dinner with Sloane, Sark paced his rented apartment.

Even if he was minded to start torturing four year old tots, he couldn't do it to this one, he didn't have him.

Mr. Six-Moves-Ahead-Of-The-Game had moved to Plan B and split the abductees up, making 'alternative arrangements' for the guarding of the kid - and Graham Caplan - well before Sloane had suggested it.

Thinking about Graham Caplan triggered a thought.

_And did that marriage make any sense? Okay, she's an annoying little bat from hell, but even so what is she doing married to that whingeing plonker? _Sark caught himself digressing. _Bloody hell Sarkey, focus!_

He had been faced with the task of mind the hostages, which to him meant keeping them hidden _and_ safe. Hidden and safe from Sloane. If they were the only possible bargaining chips he had with James Dodgson, he couldn't let Sloane have the option of destroying them.

Nope, rather than have the two locked up in some filth-ridden cell where they could keep each other company catching skin diseases, he'd made the smart move.

Irina had helped him realise something a long time ago – when she'd mentored the 'Birthday Boys' at Russia's equivalent of a prep school for spies.

_If you want to hide a key children, where do you hide it?_

His six year old self had thought quickly_ – what would be a good answer? _He stuck his hand in the air to get her attention, as school children do_. 'Among a lot of other keys, Ms Derevko.'_

He had thought quickly because he had learned through quiet observation that the bottom of the class – those who failed to please, failed to excel – 'disappeared' at the end of each term. He did not know where they went, but had a dark suspicion it was nowhere nice. He didn't recall it properly but he had actually learned the lesson that brutality was meted out the weak and defenceless long before the Project Birthday Academy. As an adult the memory of it came to him sometimes, masquerading as dreams of childhood pain and fear with people who might have been 'family'. Sark never remembered the dreams when he awoke, his mind wouldn't let him.

Nope, when faced with the problem of Aaron and his uncle, Sark had made the smart move and had put them each someplace safe where they would be hard to spot because they were surrounded by their own kind. For some reason it had pleased him to put them each some place pleasant – well, Aaron at least.

Graham Caplan had been stuck in an Amsterdam whorehouse, but little Aaron was amidst hundreds of other American shavers - having the time of his life at Disneyland Paris, tended by a nanny from one of Europe's elite childcare organisations who believed she was minding the offspring of two young marrieds second-honeymooning in Paris. He had been quietly pleased to hear Aaron sound so excited when he'd rung the nanny to let James hear him. He didn't like to think of the kid suffering. He was only four, a kid that young didn't deserve to be dragged into this espionage hell.

Reports suggested that Aaron had totally accepted the situation, having been told that his parents had given him the holiday as a present for being a good boy. But then Sark knew from experience, if you took a child when they were young enough you could get them to accept anything as normal. Anything.

Sark snapped-to and made his decision. He had no problem with dragging back Graham Caplan and re-acquainting him with the concept of marital fidelity via electric-shock therapy, but he drew the line at torturing little kiddies.

If Arvin Sloane wanted Aaron maimed or murdered, he'd have to hire Herod.

Sark bit his bottom lip. He'd have to pull off a risky manoeuvre – a rebellious one even –one which could potentially leave Irina and Sloane in a state of high piss off if he were found out. Ordinarily he'd be more worried about pissing off Irina, but right now he was more worried about pissing off Sloane. As far as either Sloane or Irina trying to kill him if it all went wrong, Irina might have a lot more motive, but Sloane would have a lot more opportunity.

He straightened. Well, it was a risk - particularly in the light of what else they already had planned for tomorrow - but he'd just have to run it. And okay, so Irina had rules, well actually she only had one rule - 'obey Irina' – but, dammit, sometimes rules just had to be broken!

Bugger it, he'd just have to move to Plan C!

In another part of the city, Sloane squirmed in his sleep. He always came to him in dreams – his master, Rambaldi. Blurred thoughts, ambiguous images, almost inchoate, often not consciously remembered upon awakening, but there in his head, nestling, burrowing.

He didn't know how Rambaldi came to him in dreams, he just knew that he did.

He certainly knew it was close to the time of The Telling, because Rambaldi had told him so, nudging the knowledge at him, urging him on to completion.

When The Telling came, thereafter would come Rambaldi. Their own irreligious Rapture.

And Sloane needed Rambaldi, he needed Rambaldi for his wife, Emily. She was dying of cancer but when Rambaldi returned he would bring with him the secret of life over death, the conquering of all illnesses, Rambaldi would save Emily. Sloane was sure of it. In his dreams Rambaldi had _promised_.

And surely Rambaldi would keep his promises?

Because of that, Sloane knew he would do anything to make The Telling happen. Anything.

He twisted in his sleep, sweating, anxious faced, trapped in his dream as he was trapped in the damp sheets, a man caught in a straight-jacket, an undead corpse twisting in its shroud.

Unconsciously he felt out for Emily in the bed, but she wasn't there; Emily was in quite another country. If she had been there, sleeping next to him, he would have damply curled into her, a scared animal comforted by her very presence, stilled, his dream driven from him.

But she wasn't there and he struggled on.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10: Invitation** – _a positioning that intentionally exposes openings, intending to purposely draw attacks. _

By 9.00 a.m. the next morning both Aaron and Graham were nearing Switzerland by train. Aaron was in a private carriage with his own puppet show and all the cake he could eat, Graham Caplan was drugged up and drunk, squashed in a second class compartment with a minder and a bunch of Inter-Railing students who ignored him.

A mercenary operating out of Basle had already been contacted to expect the two 'packages' for safe storage. The mercenary was known to Sark as a contact of Michael Vaughn's, the mercenary being under the apprehension that Vaughn was French Mafia. Sark had openly scoffed when he heard that one. French Mafia? As if they'd ever let that little pansy Vaughn join? The man was habitually scared of his own shadow!

Actually, Sark supposed Vaughn was just about competent in the field – well so long as Sydney Bristow was there to save him - but he wasn't quite someone he could see challenging City Hall over an absurdly high utilities bill. Too frightened of being told off.

Sark had been astounded at the mercenary's gullibility, but realised you could expect no better from a man whose centre of operations was the café his parents had left him. No wonder the only decent ballistic force the Swiss had ever produced was the Swiss Army Knife – that and the Vatican Guard, and everyone knew they wore skirts!

Well, it looked like even the preternaturally angst Agent Vaughn had his uses. As the CIA had Sark's flight-plan to Switzerland, Vaughn was bound to contact his Swiss mercenary, no doubt formulating some imminent Boys Own rescue plan.

By 11.00 a.m. both Aaron and Caplan were in the keeping of the mercenary, with the man under strict orders to keep them in the basement toilet of his cafe, but not to allow either to be harmed in any way. For the sake of appearances Sark had let Sloane know he was shipping them to the mercenary, but of course he hadn't told him where from. From now on in, with the boy and his uncle held only one floor below in the café, not even the CIA could screw it up, could they?

Just to make sure, at 11.05 a.m. Sark checked his watch as he settled down in a sniper position to cover the building from a nearby rooftop. He couldn't do Agent Vaughn's job inside the café, but he could certainly provide deadly fire to maximise the possibility of escape for the hostages if necessary. Besides, it gave him the chance to mini-cam the entire episode and he was going to need the evidence later.

He spent the intervening time doing callisthenics in his prone position. Only amateurs lay still and got cramp.

At 1.10 p.m. Vaughn finally arrived – with Sydney Bristow.

Sark grinned at the sight of her. Excellent! Vaughn couldn't be relied to shoot all the little ducks in a row, but Sydney could. With her there, the two hostages were practically home and dry. Through his sniper-sights Sark watched events unfold though the café window. After some swaggering preamble, Vaughn had slammed his mercenary contact's head down onto the counter, seemingly threatening to burn the man's face off with the combination of a lighter and a shower of schnapps. Sark found it hilarious: _Agent Vaughn's showing off in front of his new girlfriend! _

Sark mentally shrugged: _well, let him_.

Lying on the roof, Sark realised that his laughing reaction to the news of Sydney and Vaughn had not been a temporary blip; he couldn't recall precisely when it had happened but he was convinced that at some point he had simply stopped fancying Sydney Bristow. Was it around the time in Paldiski when he'd ordered her naked scrub-down to ensure her safety after the acid shower? No, he'd be lying to himself if he pretended that. He remembered the incident. At the time he could have claimed undisputed _droit de seigneur_ and inflicted the affront of watching her being showered, smirkingly adding to her humiliation, but he hadn't. It hadn't been because of his raising as a English Public School gentleman – Sark had no illusions, he knew the beast in his nature could over-ride the gentleman at will and as necessary – but because he had been almost sick with anticipation at even the thought of seeing her naked. He wouldn't admit it then, but he knew it now: he'd been terrified of standing before her and breaking down.

_Because I'm Mr. Sark and I don't do 'breaking down'._

After that he'd tried to re-boot the playfulness he'd detected during their run-in at FAPSE headquarters … _you're cute but I'll pass _… metaphorically pulling her pigtails when he met her next as she was disguised as a geisha in Tokyo.

When he'd subsequently slithered his way into SD-6, an unspoken incentive was the opportunity of getting close to her.

He'd actually had butterflies going in.

And then it had all turned to ashes. Flirt as he may, attempt to engage her as he might, it had all been one way traffic. She wouldn't, or couldn't, let go of the cold, superior, dismissive attitude she maintained toward him. Sometimes he had almost sensed that she wanted to drop it but felt compelled to continue. Was she terrified of being seen to treat him like a human being, fearful of what others might say? Then again, maybe she just didn't like him? Probably a good thing anyway, in this game relationships, feelings, were a perilous liability.

Besides, he was Mr. Sark, and Mr. Sark didn't do feelings: even with his bank balance he couldn't afford them, they cost too much.

He felt the rifle-stock shift against his jaw as he keenly watched events unfold through his scope.

Whatever Sydney's motivation for rejecting him he knew that he _had_ lost interest, he just wasn't sure precisely when. A while back? Recently? Maybe Sydney's American Princess, hard-to-get routine had simply gotten stale and unrewarding? Given his innate lack of introspection Sark didn't realise that to him, a man with an impeccable taste for the complexities of the finest wines, Sydney's adamant refusal to go beyond a one-note emotional response would have grown tedious in any case.

He thought it was strange really, that when he'd first seen her in a shoot-out at a Russian factory he had gotten the feeling that he had known who she was, that he had seen her before. He supposed he had seen her photograph in files. Well now it was almost as though he knew her too well, so much so that he told himself he was sick of her.

He watched her disappear down the stairs in the café and then come back up with the uncle and nephew. At 1.16 p.m. he covered everyone's exit and resisted a darkly playful urge to shoot Michael Vaughn in the arse just for the fun of it. At 1.17 p.m. it was all clear.

Excellent Sark reflected, Aaron would be at the U.S. embassy in time for afternoon tea, if the Americans did such a thing.

He deftly bagged his equipment and checked his diver's watch as he made for a nearby black van. Good timing: he'd be prompt for the day's second round of larcenous mayhem.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11: Al La Macchia** – _an informal rough-and-tumble duel "out in the woods", often by groups as well as individuals._

Three hours later Sark and Sloane had successfully robbed a bank, stealing the prototype of a magnetometer James Dodgson had been working on at Neotech.

Both men knew that they'd need it later.

Sark reflected that the jaunt hadn't gone utterly smoothly - did it ever? – but that the disruption hadn't been anything he couldn't handle. After all, it had only involved extracting Sloane and the magnetometer from a speeding car as driven by a hell-bent Sydney Bristow.

When Sydney and Vaughn had turned up mid-heist, Sark had only been partly surprised, after all, he already knew they were in town; but even he had been taken aback to see them turn up at the bank while Sloane was still in it. It had emerged that they'd tracked Sloane to his whereabouts by tracing cell-phone calls between Sloane and the Swiss mercenary holding the Caplans. Sloane had been checking up on the hostages. Checking up on Sark.

Sark sighed, Sloane always had been an annoying bastard.

Approximately five hours after watching Aaron being swept to safety, one hour after getting Sloane calmed down after the magnetometer stunt, and two hours before Sloane's eight o'clock deadline on James' life, Sark moved down the stairs to the lower basement of a disused factory that had once produced fondue sets. It was where they kept James Dodgson.

In a day that had seen him rob a bank, engage in a high-speed pursuit, and outwit the CIA – twice – he sensed this was going to be the hard part.

He didn't know why he was so anxious. As a man who was totally task orientated, Sark avoided self-analysis – in his darker moments he suspected it was because he was frightened of what he might find inside – so when it came to self-questioning he didn't have the tools for it.

A man he had once gone up against, who had known a little of Sark's involvement in Project Birthday, had sneeringly explained to him that the reason why Sark was so self-controlled was because in his life he had never really had any control at all. The big choices, of who he was, of _what_ he was, had been taken from him aged four.

Sark had shot him straight in the face.

Moving down the stairs, he didn't recall that previous incident, he was too busy pondering how to play the current one. Well, he'd have to wing it. No time for anything else. Mr. Sark didn't like 'winging it', Mr. Sark liked plans, objectives, strategies, but around James Dodgson plans seemed to go awry anyway so … he summoned all his wits and resolve and turned into the room where he knew James sat: time to face it.

There were three guards there, he motioned them to leave.

He saw James stiffen warily as he entered, and then watched her stiffen even more so at her realisation that they were now alone. He supposed it was only natural that she be more cautious of him now, after all, she had seen him kill a man in cold blood: up close and completely impersonal so to speak.

In actuality James was suppressing her screaming need to ask about Aaron. She didn't dare look up at Sark in case her famously limited self-control snapped and she blurted out to know where he was. That would give Sark even more leverage over her than he already had, and would further endanger Aaron.

James had reasoned that Aaron's greatest source of protection was Sark believing she didn't care enough about her nephew to make it worthwhile hurting him.

After the guards had gone, Sark circled the room like a light plane circling a landing field in poor weather: hesitant, unsure of whether it can put down. James maintained her focus on the laptop.

The silence in the room was alive. To his amazement, Sark broke first.

"It's getting hot in here."

Oh for fuck's sake Sarkey – that's right, lead with your jaw! 

He winced at his own stupidity. He was really going to pay for that one. James didn't let him down.

"And what am I supposed to do?" she snapped, "invite you to 'take off all your clothes'?"

Yep, his slow wide serve had gotten the response it deserved: a two-fisted back-hand, straight down the line.

He moved to the air-conditioner control, his voice betraying nothing of his self-annoyance. "I'll see if I can get it to improve."

"Sure, and if it won't co-operate, just threaten to shoot it."

Knowing he had no qualms about using his gun, James' voice shook as she said the words 'shoot it'.

Sark felt his jaw tighten with aggravation.

Christ - could she just cut me some slack? - I'm trying to be nice! 

Well, he couldn't complain, hadn't he known this would be the hard part? But did she have to make it quite so bloody difficult? Hadn't she learned _anything_ from yesterday's execution? He turned to her, speaking more harshly than he intended.

"Doctor, don't you think it would behove you to at least try to be friendly? You are, after all, in the hands of captors - it might be best if they at least liked you."

Sark mentally slapped himself: _they?_ _Who the fuck's 'they' Sarkey? It's 'we', remember?_

James gave way to a sudden disbelief and fear.

"_What?" _she screamed,_ "_ I should smile and simper like a good little girl?" Her face was a contorted mask of angry disbelief. Sark was almost taken aback. "Yeah, I can see that me bein' kidnapped, drugged, threatened with torture and having my family held in jeopardy would make us the best of friends. Hey, just think, in three years time we can go around tellin' folks how we first met!"

Sark was astonished. He found himself in the strange position of staring blankly into the space between them and feeling…what? Uncertainty? Embarrassment? As though he'd been slapped in the face? He realised he'd forgotten how to precisely define some emotions, and while he was about it, what was that funny fluttery feeling in his stomach? James railed on.

"Let's just understand somethin' junior," she screamed, rising as much out of her chair as her shackles allowed. "I am being held here against my will! I have been dragged off the streets and into this world of spies and ancient devices and I'm smart enough to know that I'm probably gonna die here – me and my family along with me! And if I do co-operate then I'm probably gonna end up buildin' some goddamn Doomsday Weapon that the Government is gonna get me for. So however you look at it you smirking, blond bastard, I am _totally fucked_!"

Sark felt a certainty arise from out of his confusion. She was expressing fear and rage? Good! At least that was a reaction he could predict and work with, one he understood! Sark's uncharacteristic flush of doubts left him. He knew how to play this scene now, he knew how to play it to win.

When he spoke, his voice was very calm.

"Quite Doctor. You are, as you so quaintly put it: 'totally fucked'. So, as things can't get any worse for you, you might as well listen to the comprehensive offer I'm about to make. Let us hope that you accept it."

At L.A. CIA there was an emergency debriefing on both the Caplan rescue and the magnetometer heist. Jack, Kendall, Weiss and Marshall were in the Ops room at L.A., Sydney and Vaughn were live from Switzerland via satellite link.

Dixon wasn't there.

Not for the first time Jack wished Dixon had been willing to merge with the CIA, but the man was still estranged from operations, still coming to terms with his sense of betrayal. Jack knew that Dixon felt most betrayed not by having been duped by SD-6, but by having been left in the dark by the CIA, by having been played by his own side. Jack knew all about that, he'd been there, done that and been handed the T-shirt. Jack wanted Dixon back. Dixon was a man who could talk sense into Sydney and his field instincts were usually spot on. Having Dixon's calm support in analysis was something Jack missed at times, one of those times being now.

There were occasions when Jack privately labelled L.A. CIA 'Dumbass Central' and it was days like today that reminded him why.

Kendall was fulsomely complimenting the team, a.k.a. himself, on the successful rescue of the 'Caplans'. They hadn't yet gotten onto the less successful loss of Sloane and the magnetometer. When it came to that, Kendall would be berating the team, a.k.a. _not_ himself.

"Excellent work Agents Bristow and Vaughn. Vaughn, good call on that mercenary connection. East Coast will be impressed."

Over the slightly grainy com-link, Vaughn's grin of modest self-congratulation could be seen, as could Sydney's more pensive, quizzical look.

Watching her expression, Jack felt proud. His girl may be have been an occasional brat in her private life, but get her in the field and her game-player's instincts kicked right in. Jack knew from the slight frown on Sydney's face that she suspected there was something amiss with the Caplan rescue; there was: it had been far too easy. Jack cut Kendall off in mid-spiel.

"Oh please. Have we all taken leave of our senses?" He paused to make sure he had everyone's attention. "The extraction was far too easy. Two of the captives were found in the actual basement toilet of our mercenary's front - a _café?_ It couldn't get any more ridiculous!"

Jack found himself momentarily distracted by noticing that Weiss was wearing a soup-stained shirt and a tie that was an offence to the retina. He saw that Marshall Flinkman was also staring at the tie.

"Wow Weiss," Marshall interrupted, "really cool tie!"

Jack reflected that some days the place was sheer Kindergarten and re-imposed an iron grip on Dumbass Central.

"Since when did a man like Sark award jobs based on who made the lowest stupidity tender?"

His point, once made, was obvious. Sark didn't hire dumb. So how had they gotten the hostages so easily? The room and the uplink connection went silent. Vaughn's face fell. Kendall's ego needed a splint.

Conversation and chatter gradually re-asserted itself as they debated the possibilities. Vaughn was still plugging for the 'brilliant hunch' line. No-one else could suggest any other seemingly logical explanation for events, even though they all knew that the 'brilliant hunch' stank.

Marshall piped up cheerfully. "Hey, maybe Sark let them go?" There was a stunned silence as everyone – on both sides of the Atlantic - stared at him. Marshall felt himself shrinking in his seat. "I mean, he's really not that bad. Well, at SD-6 - he used to come and see me? - he was always - "

"Marshall? Shut up!"

Marshall dipped his head at Kendall's order and thought that maybe it would be best if he just went back to playing Level III of Attack Of The Killer Chipmunks in his head.

The debate resumed, with people chipping in with half-ideas and circling around concepts, and all coming up with nothing. No-one noticed that Sydney, by her standards, was almost silent. Head down, hair hanging to obscure her face, shoulders slightly hunched, she projected the air of someone who was struggling with their own not very comfortable thoughts. The one person who would have noticed was Jack, but he was deep in considerations of his own.

He was pondering on Marshall's comment.

Could it really be that the hostages had been found because they were meant to have been found? What were the odds? … _A damn sight higher than mere coincidence, that's for sure … _Certainly Sloane wouldn't do that, he didn't have the style … but Sark?

The thought was astonishing. Why would Sark deliberately arrange the secret release of hostages? What was the advantage to him? Well … not unless … Jack was struck by a thought so bizarre that he kept it to himself.

Not unless it was some extraordinary, fucked-up gesture of goodwill from Sark to Dr. James Dodgson.

"Regard it as a rather fumbling gesture of goodwill, Doctor."

In the Swiss basement, Sark was detailing his 'comprehensive offer' to James Dodgson.

James had decided to listen. After all, what was it going to cost her, three minutes of her life? May as well hear him out.

He had told her of the day's events, well, at least that part concerning her husband and nephew. To back it up he'd showed her his mini-cam recording of the incident. James looked so sceptical that Sark thought she might just be on the verge of outright, disbelieving laughter.

"What? You want me to work with you – so you let Aaron and Graham go?"

"Doctor, as you can see from the recording, if I had been of a mind to, I could have quite easily shot both CIA agents and recaptured your relatives."

"How do I know it was you shooting the film?"

The mini-cam record was still playing. Right on cue the camera turned around to catch a sardonic Sark waving directly into the lens.

James found herself wrangling a sudden, unwanted thought: _shit, that bastard's photogenic!_ She batted it away.

"How do I know these 'agents' aren't just two of your own people, that this thing wasn't staged and you still have Aaron and Graham?"

Sark purred to himself, hands clasped behind his back, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet. He had always adored the company of brilliant women, and James was such an exceptionally clever little beast. There she was with her screwed up, questioning little face, duking it out with him and not just accepting his word for any of it. Anyone weaker would have just mindlessly accepted it, giving in to their need to believe that it was true, that Aaron and Graham were free. But she? She was pushing, closing down on all the angles, looking for loopholes, proving to herself that it was true even at the risk of finding out it wasn't.

God, he loved smart women.

"Why would I trick you with that ploy Doctor? If at some point I were to reveal I still held them, it could only be for the purposes of pressuring you by hurting them and if I thought that were a viable line of persuasion, I would have already done it." He knew she saw the logic of it and pushed his point. "Dr. Dodgson, holding your relatives was of no advantage to me. Frankly, I think you'd work better for me if you were freed of the anxiety for their safety. Letting them go was the wise move, after all, I know I certainly won't get your full concentration or co-operation if your relatives are harmed." He considered his next choice of words. "And … whilst I would not be so foolish as to hurt them, I am aware that Mr. Sloane is … less circumspect. In short Doctor, I have removed two pieces from the board which were of no use to me, but instead essentially posed a danger to my game; and I like to think that the manner in which I chose to do so will somewhat mitigate against your dislike of me."

James' gaze hit him in a flat stare, her lip curling. "You know, you must be the only person I know who speaks in paragraphs?" Her voice rose a notch. "You killed that German guy right in front of me! How am I supposed to trust you having seen you do that?"

"I'm not asking you to _trust_ me Doctor, I'm asking you to complete a body of work for me. As it is," he inwardly winced at the next two words he was about to use, " 'German Guy' was attempting to cheat my associates and I of tens of millions of dollars. He, unlike you, actively sought to work with us, that he attempted a financial double-cross was an error on his part."

She collected herself. "Okay, now that you've given up the hostages why should I co-operate with you at all?"

He smiled demurely, "Because I still hold you." He unholstered his gun and laid it on the table, letting it speak for him – they both knew he was quite capable of using it. He continued speaking. "To clarify the situation, Uncle Arvin is going to come though those doors in about two hours and, I might say, he's rather put out at the CIA having retrieved your relatives. He also seeks some concrete evidence of your 'worth' as regards Rambaldi. In his current mood, if you are not able to provide it I know he will kill you and then attempt to find someone else who will help him. As I suspect that you have already solved the puzzle with the artefact, I strongly suggest you furbish him with the solution - and that we carry on from there."

James forced herself to appear calm. Thank God she'd already worked out that wand crap. "Carry on?" she queried, her voice trying to give away nothing.

Sark was amused at the way her voice wobbled when she was stressed.

"This," he indicated the work on the tabletop, "was merely a test. The ultimate task is the compilation of a much larger and more complex Rambaldi artefact. That is the real work you will do for Sloane – for me."

In truth he didn't have a clue what they were building next and didn't care. All he was interested in was building something alarming or alluring enough to tip the CIA into letting Irina go out after Sloane. Once she was out, he would extract her.

James spoke up. "How do I know you won't just kill me when I'm done?"

Sark smirked. "It's no secret to the US Government that Mr. Sloane and I hold you captive. They know perfectly well who we are and what we look like. They are also painfully aware that we are interested in amassing, using and profiting from Rambaldi devices. After you have compiled the main device, it will be safe to release you as there will be nothing you can tell them that they won't already know. There will be absolutely no point in killing you."

Sark wondered if she'd buy that. Maybe it would turn out to be true?

"Why shouldn't I just tell Sloane what you did with Aaron and Graham?"

Sark's smile was angelic. "Go ahead - he won't believe you."

She eyed him sourly, he was right of course:_ the clever little bastard._

"Besides," continued Sark, his voice having the tonality of poisoned honey, "right now I'm the nearest thing to an ally you've got. If you prompt Sloane to attempt to kill me, then all you may be left with is an angry and unpredictable Sloane."

"Well I'll give you one thing, you're a logical little fucker. Got all the angles covered, ain't ya?"

Sark struggled to keep a grin of sheer self-congratulation off his face: he failed. "True, I have. It's terribly déclassé to congratulate oneself I know, but really, sometimes I am rather wonderful aren't I?"

James' face slid into an expression of eye-rolling resignation as she regarded him, and then she perked up. "Hey, d'ya think the church still does excommunications? Maybe I could order you one over the phone?"

Sark could hardly keep the laughing purr out of his voice at her oblique insult. "Does that indicate compliance Doctor?" He had her in a corner and they both knew it. He looked like a cat who held a mouse in its clamped, smiling jaws, the flickering tail still dangling out.

James' shoulders slumped. She had been outmanoeuvred on this one. Sark had stitched her up. She parodied the line from _Casablanca,_ drawling it out in her Louisiana twang, voice thick with disdain. "Gee, Blond Guy, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Sark graciously took James' comment as a statement of goodwill, well, as a statement of as good-as-it-was-going-to-get will, and awaited Sloane's arrival. When an embittered Sloane did arrive, he was given a complete run down of the schematics for compiling the Rambaldi Wand - a harmonics device that could realign the molecular structure of small quantities of base metals – among other things it would effectively enable the user to turn lead into gold.

Sloane's eyes gleamed with sheer greed, almost normal for him. In truth he was exultant. Viewing her work he knew that his aspiration was within reach. Dodgson could do it, she could build The Telling.

Watching Sloane and Sark together, James reflected that she had been given an option equivalent to that of choosing between the two leaders of the French Revolution: Sark's Danton or Sloane's Robespierre. The choice of a hypocrite versus a fanatic. She decided she had chosen wisely, given a choice like that you took the hypocrite every time. Unlike the fanatic the hypocrite at least knew when they were going too far, even if they still went there anyway.

As Sloane's fulsome praise washed over her she wished she hadn't instinctively compared them to Danton and Robespierre after all. She uncomfortably recollected that in the eventual showdown between the two, Danton had lost. When Danton's conscience had rebelled and he had finally moved against Robespierre in an attempt to halt the bloodshed, Robespierre had arranged Danton's execution. Robespierre had met his own gory end shortly after of course, but not before Danton was dead.

It was a disquieting comparison.

Unaware of her thoughts, Sark watched Sloane and James and congratulated himself: the first hurdle crossed, that much closer to springing Irina and hey, hardly anyone dead yet.

Upon Sloane's departure, Sark quickly arranged for himself and James to remove to another location. He decided they should move into Russia – a place as far removed from America and the CIA as they could get. Sloane would travel on later, after he had visited his wife in Italy.

Sark spent the night making arrangements. Sloane spent the night travelling to Italy. And James? For some reason she had the best night's sleep she'd had in days.

An ocean away, Jack had gone down to Irina's cell before he'd gone home for the night, at midnight. Jack rarely went 'home' any earlier, why bother? – there was no-one there.

Besides, tonight his mind had been chasing down on possibilities.

If he had been right about Sark deliberately giving up the Caplans, then Sark must have known that Vaughn would contact the mercenary, and for that Sark must have known that the CIA had his flight plan to Switzerland.

Jack didn't know why, he didn't even know how, seeing as she was trapped an underground glass cell a continent away from Sark and was monitored by permanent surveillance, but God did he have the feeling that the glittering presence of Irina Derevko was at the back of all this somehow.

He was going down to see her for intel.

He told himself there was no other reason.

He certainly told himself that the pounding heartbeat in his chest was not anticipation.

He stared at her through the glass, determined not to let any feelings show – determined not to _have _any feelings. Irina had no such reservations, she came up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

"Jeez, Jack - it's the early hours of the morning. What's the matter, suddenly realise you've got tomorrow's date down in your diary for the arrival of the Apocalypse but had forgotten to let anyone know?"

Jack said nothing, but felt his heart give a slow, lazy thump as his unwavering gaze took in the kitten-pretty face on the other side of the glass. Why could this woman still make his blood sing, even after a 20 years gap? How could she still make him want to laugh out loud at one of her casual throw-away lines, even after all she'd done? He saw her look up at him out of one sleep-laden eye, the other closed against the harsh light, and suddenly realised he'd come unprepared. After all, not only was he uncomfortably unsure of what he felt, but what was there to say? 'Hey Irina, are you scheming behind our backs with Sark?' Sure, she'd really admit to that one.

Irina's expression began to unfurl as she increasingly awoke: she looked at him with genuine amusement and not a little puzzlement, as though she were pondering something. In response, Jack readied himself: okay, what was she going to hit him with this time?

As her mind got into gear Irina was pondering alright – she was pondering why Jack was there. Was it about the Swiss endeavour? Sark had signalled her about it, a short burst to let her know that despite the CIA's efforts, he now had the magnetometer which would help Dodgson in her Rambaldi calculations. In his message to her, Irina had been puzzled at something: Sark hadn't included anything about Sydney, even though Irina rationalised that Sydney must have been there. Odd, Sark normally had something in his codes about Sydney, like a boy who had a secret crush and couldn't quite stop talking about the girl concerned. Irina had always been very willing to indulge him in it, even before she'd unearthed that recent Rambaldi page that had told her far more about him than she had ever suspected.

But then … maybe she secretly had suspected it all along?

She snapped back to the current issue: was Jack's visit about Switzerland? About Sydney and Sark? Irina decided upon some explorative needling. Well to start with, she thought, may as well get him on the topic of boys and girls. Her tone was secretive, whispering, conspiratorial.

"Jack? You know when Sydney brought home her first boyfriends, all those filthy boys who were just scheming to get at your little girl? What did you actually do to those lads?"

Jack stared at Irina and kept a totally poker face. _Why the hell was she asking? … May as well answer._ "I terrorised the first one who came calling and let word get round."

Irina's spontaneous laughter started off as a burble and then rose to fill the space between them. Correspondingly, Jack's mouth pulled up slightly at one corner in what may or may not have been a smile.

Irina processed his answer. Not laying his cards out huh? May as well jump straight in on a hunch then. She smiled, easy, expansive.

"He's really not that different from you Jack."

Jack's face straightened in a sudden surge of suspicion. _Here it comes, she's revving up for something_.

"Who's not that different?" _Dammit, why did I even give her the edge by asking?_

"Sark."

Jack blinked. Irina mentally punched the air – _Got you!_

Jack looked at Irina – Goddammit she was getting more out of him than he was getting out of her! If she knew anything, he knew then that she wasn't damn well telling.

Irina looked at Jack – he'd gotten his defences up, if anything odd had gone on in Switzerland, she knew then that he wasn't damn well telling.

They both thought: _time to ring the bell on this round and retire._

Jack nodded, formal, proper. "Goodnight Irina."

Irina nodded, impish, naughty. "Goodnight Jack."

As her mother and father toyed with each other like cat and mouse – neither quite sure who was the cat and who was the mouse - Sydney sat on a night-flight military transport returning from Europe, the rescued hostages asleep in the hold.

Vaughn typed up his field report on a laptop a little distance away, occasionally looking up at her with a fond and acknowledging smile.

Sydney had managed to smile back, well she had hoped it had looked like a smile.

She was pre-occupied with her own ill at ease thoughts that had been digging away at her since the video-comm. It didn't help that her recent bruising encounters with her parents had made her feel slightly distant from Vaughn. She covertly glanced across at him. It wasn't so much what her mom and dad had said concerning him – _yeah,_ _like they could give advice on coupledom!_ – but because of what she'd detected as Vaughn's essential unwillingness to talk about his evasions over Jack. She felt vaguely questioning of him.

That wasn't the specific cause of why she was so silent just now though.

Her reason? She was feeling like a kid at school who was hiding a guilty misdemeanour, who felt they ought to 'fess up' but didn't quite have the nerve to do it.

She felt the same great, squirming, almost fearful discomfort she'd had as a child after her mother had 'died', when she had habitually sat folded up, cross-legged on her bedroom floor, hiding alone under a makeshift tent made out of a blanket and a broomstick: safe, keeping the world out. She didn't remember it, but she'd learned another trick then. When she had to go outside her tent, she hid inside herself instead, pretending she was someone else. Without her tent, she had hid inside her own skin.

Sydney leant forward unhappily, arms folded across her stomach, as though rocking herself. Marshall's debriefing comment – that maybe Sark had let the hostages go - had struck a chord with her, but all she had done was say nothing as others scoffed at even the possibility that the heartless Mr. Sark might know just one crumb of human decency. Sydney twisted uncomfortably in her flight seat, her conscience landing repeated thumps on her. She knew she should have spoken up, she should have offered the corroborating evidence, she should have mentioned what had happened earlier that very same afternoon: that during Sark's high-speed extraction of Sloane he'd had the plain and open chance to kill her at point-blank range and had deliberately not taken it.

Sydney unthinkingly and repeatedly rubbed a hand to and fro across her mouth - a gesture of anxiety.

She was on a plane full of people, but all the company in the world would have left her alone with her thoughts.

Irina watched Jack turn and go as though if she could just stare hard enough she could gain information merely by looking at his back. She couldn't. Technically, as they had never been divorced, she gazed at the man who was still her husband. Immensely tall and solidly broad, a human being built on a grand scale. Oddly handsome, a redoubtable intellect, an iron will, and utterly uncaring of what those about him thought of him.

He was overwhelmingly the coolest guy she had ever met.

Damn! She spun a half-turn on her heel, her arms crossed. She didn't know precisely what, but something must have snagged Jack's interest to bring him down here. Unless it really was only just the magnetometer and he were fishing for random intel? No, she decided, not Jack, he didn't do random. It was definitely Sark, but what? Had something happened between her protégé and her daughter … ?

She was not overly worried that it would have been anything overwhelmingly negative. She knew, even though each had never rationalised it, and certainly never to her, that neither of them had seriously tried to kill the other. Ever.

That history of holding off made sense – when you knew what she now knew.

She wandered back to her cot. Sydney and Sark. A stunning combination. Her daughter's fire and Sark's poised control. Sydney's innate warmth to counterbalance Sark's essential reserve. Sark's fundamental sense of restraint to rein in Sydney's emotional self-indulgence. If they could just manage to spend ten minutes in a room together without either going for a gun, they would be an unbeatable combination. Given what they were up against, Irina knew they would have to be.

She lay on her cot, ankles elegantly crossed, hands folded loosely across her abdomen, reflecting.

But … did she _want_ Sydney mixing with Sark, if she had a choice? It was ridiculous, there was no choice, she'd sensed that when she'd recently unearthed the page which had lain hidden for centuries, but …

Sark was an extraordinary individual, as much as Sydney, but 'extraordinary' had it's drawbacks – for both of them. Sydney was the distillation of a line of powerful Russian matriarchs. Women who, down the generations, had chosen their many lovers, discarding those deemed unworthy, mating with those whom they selected as a fitting father for any of their children. That shameless, selective strain ran through Sydney, but Irina felt that mired in her modern romantic mores Sydney couldn't handle it. For his part Sark was the descendent of a line of great Russian patriarchs. Controlling, powerful men as possessed of a compulsion to bequeath their genetics on to the next generation as Irina's line of great women had been to bequeath theirs.

And that was the difficulty. What was that old phrase, _maternity is a matter fact, paternity is a matter of opinion?_ The Derevko women had obviously known their offspring were theirs, the Lazarey men had been forced to make sure that their children were so. As such, with the women they chose as acknowledged mates, the male line was hard wired with an unyielding, possessive jealousy. They had to be, otherwise their genetic line would have dissipated centuries ago in a welter of deceit, drowned out by the bastard children of other men.

She recalled something Sark had once said to her during one of their more open and relaxed after-dinner conversations.

_Irina, sex is a power struggle, it's an issue of dominance and submission._ He'd raised his wine glass to her and laughed. _Anyone who doesn't know that just hasn't had a really good fuck._

He'd been 17 when he'd said that. He had lived at such speed, at such ferocious intensity, that at 17 he already thought he knew everything life was about. At the time Irina had laughed back, whole-heartedly delighting in her young protégé's worldly cynicism, but now that her own daughter could really become involved with him …

Irina was a woman of great perception, she understood fully that love was all about equality, it was about what you gave rather than what you took, what you surrendered, not what you conquered. It was about all the things Sark didn't do. He didn't give – not truly - he didn't surrender – not really - he expected to be in control, moving others about like pieces on a chessboard. Those were among the very factors she admired about him. They were also the very reasons why Irina instinctively knew that if Sark ever suddenly found himself at the mercy of being in love with another, then he would fight it every inch of the way: trying to destroy it for fear of it destroying him.

Irina knew that Sark had no sexual interest in herself, any potential interest between them had been blotted out by their variation of an almost mother/son relationship, so she could only guess with a vague anxiety at how his need for control and his iron possessiveness would express itself with someone he actually loved.

She feared the results might not be pretty.

The next day at a deserted, private airfield in eastern France, Sark extracted Dr. James Dodgson to Russia. Naturally she tried to escape before they boarded the plane. Twice. The first time was when she'd gone for the van door as it had pulled up at a stop-light on the journey there, a desperate ploy but who knew, they might have left it unlocked? The second was at the airfield before boarding the small business jet parked there. It was as desperate a try as the first, but with the visceral urge of an animal that senses its last chance for freedom, she'd gone for it anyway. Swallowing her fear, she had struggled past the guard who was pulling her out of the van, breaking free and racing across the tarmac. She kept running on instinct, even though she could see that there was no place to go and no help for miles. She expected Sark to let off a warning shot at any second.

Instead, all she could hear was the bastard's genuinely amused laughter. Far from being angry, Sark found himself grinningly enjoying her efforts; surveying her with a slightly distant, predatory gaze. In place of letting off a warning shot he set off after her at a lazy run, picking up speed and accelerating into her.

They could not have been more opposite. Sark - wearing a black 8000 suit as casually as other men wore sweats – exuded a playful athleticism. James - dirty, dishevelled, badly dressed - had obviously always been the last to be picked for any sports team. He caught up with her easily, catching her round the waist, spinning her up off her feet and carrying her back. She was so small and lightweight that he didn't really need both arms, he could almost have tucked her under just one as he strolled back.

"You'll never get away with this!" she screamed, furiously trying to prise free from his grip and having no effect whatsoever.

"I'm trying to remember Doctor, but haven't you said something like that before? If I recall," his voice was all cool amusement, "you were wrong then too."

"You are one smug bastard! - do you know that?"

"Ah, you highly educated geniuses – such witty rejoinders."

Laughing, he flung her bodily into the plane where she landed on her back. He dropped down next to her, swiftly cuffing her to a seat stanchion. She continued to struggle even though her endeavours were futile. Above her, Sark was thoroughly enjoying the situation, a light smirk playing about his mouth.

He found himself making no effort to get up. Instead he shifted to a crouch, elbows on knees, hands dropping casually into the gap between them, looking down at her with his detached gaze and that tilted-jaw way that was so particular to him.

She really was quite fascinating in her own odd way, he reflected.

"God loves a tryer James." He raised his eyebrows demurely, looking down upon her, and then gave a moue of commiseration. "Such a pity I'm on the side of the Devil."

She spat out her exasperated disgust. "Could you _be_ any more annoying?"

He laughed and then was suddenly all business, bouncing to his feet and barking orders at the man in the flight cabin to get the plane started. As the engines roared into life Sark made his way forward and took the pilot's seat. He ordered everyone off but James. His crew departed without complaint, they had already been paid, and goddamn it but they were sick of the screaming American. The plane taxied and took off. Over the sound of the rushing engines Sark could still hear James roaring at him from inside the passenger cabin; shrieking that he was an ass-hat piece of pond-scum and adding, somewhat illogically he reflected as she was actually on the flight: _and I hope you crash, you butt-beagle!_

_Butt-beagle?_ Sark bit down on his bottom lip, grinning. He loved American swear-words. So inventive, so utterly _sneering_.

He made the engines scream as they ripped off into the sky. There they were, no flight plan, no air crew to say where they'd gone, no evidence of their destination. Nothing before them but blue skies. When they landed and were a short but safe distance from the jet, he'd flick a couple of switches and watch it blow up. He'd pick up his new crew later.

Remembering Shipman airfield, he had made sure that there would be no evidence whatsoever to indicate where they had gone to or where they had come from.

Sark occasionally made mistakes, but he never made the same one twice.

As the plane flew on he felt calm, poised, his customary sense of control reasserting itself. He realised he hadn't felt this clear since this whole business with the kidnapping had begun. He congratulated himself, he had swept the board of all extraneous pieces: there was no Aaron to worry about, he'd got rid of the husband and there was no bloody CIA. A thought came to him: most importantly there was no irritating, annoying, aggravating, self-righteous Sydney Bloody Bristow coming along to bollocks things up for him!

A fleeting and unwanted memory of Sydney came to him from the incident when he'd extracted Sloane from her speeding car. His mouth compressed in irritation at the fact that he was even bothering to recall it. But he was though, wasn't he? His face clouded with annoyance. Okay, so he hadn't felt _nothing_ when he'd seen her, but what had he felt? He refused to dwell on it and told himself instead that … _he'd felt fucking annoyed at her, that's what!_

As to his current situation – he felt that sense of well-being visit him again. Well, there was still Sloane and Irina, but otherwise … otherwise there was just a clean field of play between himself and the brilliant Dr. James Dodgson. For some reason that suddenly gave him an almost piratical sense of glee. His face split into a grin of devilish delight.

_Let the games begin!_

Hundreds of miles away, Sloane had landed in Italy and found the comfort of Emily's arms. He still dreamt his dark Rambaldi dreams, but at the times when he abruptly awoke, her very presence comforted him. His was a cruel dilemma - she was what stood between him and the dark, yet she was why he repeatedly had to embrace the dark, to save her.

He sometimes thought that she was the only thing that kept him sane.

He never dared imagine what would happen if she were to be gone for good.

_Author's note_: Jack's 'terrorised the first one who came calling' joke was adapted from something Bruce Willis once said about his daughters.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12: First Blood** - _a duel that is fought only to the first sight of drawn blood as opposed to "to the death" or to the opponent "yielding". _

Having arrived back in L.A., Sydney still reflected upon the incidents in Switzerland – upon the rescue of the Caplan hostages and of the business surrounding the theft of the magnetometer.

She was in her kitchen at night, occasionally catching her reflection in the darkened window as she washed the dishes. She hadn't been able to get her mind off Switzerland since she had returned to L.A. She felt a deep discomfort at it. It was as though she wanted to forget about it but couldn't, as though she was having to fend off some part of herself, some deep hidden part that was about to … _pounce?_ She caught her reflection in the glass again: she looked furtive. Pensive, she admitted to an uncomfortable truth: she wasn't thinking about what had happened in Switzerland so much as she was thinking about Sark's role in it.

She recalled her recent conversation with Irina where she'd come out thinking of herself as a jerk and had thus resolved to be more straight with herself. She glanced up again at the woman in the window and frowned crossly at her:_ oh cut the crap lady and just be honest!_

She cut the crap and got honest. She wasn't thinking about Sark's role in Switzerland so much as she was thinking about Sark.

She heard a noise come from the lounge as Vaughn switched on the TV and she started with guilt at the mundane homely comfort of it: she bent over the sink again, angrily scrubbing away at a stain she'd decided was just being plain stubborn. Ordinarily she and Vaughn washed up together, or they just loaded up the dish-washer and then moved to the sofa in the lounge where they could snuggle up. Tonight was different. She'd made the excuse of washing the dishes, saying he should go and watch the game on TV, knowing that she had wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Francie – Christ but Francie had been so distant lately - and Will were away for the night.

Rinsing a cup, her troubled memories of Switzerland flooded her again, and for the umpteenth time her photographic memory replayed the incident of Sloane's extraction in her head. She saw Sark's face watching her from his own speeding vehicle as he trained his pistol on her from mere feet away. She saw his gaze hold hers as they both knew he had a clear and annihilating kill-shot straight to her head. And then she saw him deliberately dip his aim and shoot her off the road by hitting the hood of her car instead.

It hadn't been like that time at FAPSE Headquarters where he'd held a gun to her head, but not pulled the trigger. It hadn't even been like that time in Paldiski where he'd trapped her under that shower of acid, but given her the option to deal her way out. No, those were incidents where Sark had gotten at least some advanced warning, where he'd had the fractional time needed to plan his tactics, to gain control of himself before the game began. Switzerland was different. Switzerland had been an on the fly, hot blooded conflict. And okay, so her mom had probably drilled it into him how important Sydney was to her when he'd worked for her in the past, and Sloane disgustingly regarded her as almost 'family', but was that why Sark had stayed his hand? It had been an adrenalin pumping show-down. In such a 'split second decisions' and 'no time to rationalise' environment she knew from experience that all previous orders from some far off Handler went out the window. At such times pure instinct took over. She could not evade the fact that Sark's over-riding instinct toward her had been: Don't Kill.

Standing in the kitchen, part of her started screaming at herself. Why was she even thinking about Sark? She was in a relationship with Vaughn! They'd waited for over a year! She was betraying Vaughn by just even dwelling on Sark in her mind!

And that, of course, was why she knew she needed to be alone right then, because she couldn't even begin to examine her feelings if she were lying in Vaughn's arms, she'd be too busy silently raging at herself that she shouldn't even try to untangle her thoughts.

_Two speeding vehicles on a road in Switzerland – and a man who hadn't shot her._

She slammed her hands down into the soapy water, causing splashes to rise up. _Stop thinking about him! Stop it! Stop thinking about Sark!_

She took a deep, almost sobbing breath.

_Yeah, why should I stop?_ - another side of her spoke up defiantly - _why shouldn't I think of him? It's not a crime just to think!_

Sydney forced herself to steady, bravely acknowledging that her anger at herself for even thinking about Sark was just another one of her decoys, yet another one of her excuses to go round in a circle again, anything to avoid going through that mental door that had lain straight ahead of her now for a year.

Her hands slammed down rigidly into the kitchen sink, palms beating against the steel, her face screwed up almost to the point of furious tears as one part of her fought the other. One part wanted to mentally stay where she was, the other insisted on moving forward. Moving forward won.

She broke through the door in her mind.

A little cry escaped her throat as she entered the place where she kept something so dark that she'd tried to hide it even from herself: the fact that she had feelings for Sark.

Finally she had admitted it.

With a stifled little cry she slumped forward over the sink, arms up to the elbows in water. _Oh God, please don't let this be, don't let me care about him. I won't. I can't! If I care about him then I can't go on! _But even as she knew the pain of fumbling towards what she felt, she experienced something else as well, a terrible relief that she was at last allowing herself to feel at all.

Hanging over the kitchen sink, Sydney Bristow - American Princess, true blue girl-scout, honour bright - finally gave herself permission to drop her mask of High School Cheerleader Perfection and just be human. She finally bestowed the mercy upon herself which she regularly showered upon others, she allowed herself to be just as weak as anyone else.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every prolonged strenuous effort to restrain an emotion, the eventual release is all the more overwhelming. Sydney's release was cataclysmic. She couldn't even try to control the sobs that broke from her. Her legs weakened and buckled and she hung over the countertop for support. She moved blindly away from the sink like a wounded animal. She was crying so hard and so deep that it was almost soundless.

She couldn't care about him, she couldn't – _he was the bad guy!_

Some time passed, time enough for Sydney to cry out her stifled sobbing and to gather together her few remaining damp scraps of self-possession. As Vaughn still watched the game in the other room, she sat in the kitchen before a calming cup of tea, relatively composed but her breath still shaky and her face raw and red from crying.

_Tea! – _she thought to herself - _She should have known what she was about when she'd bought a packet of the vile stuff. She'd only bought it because she'd heard Brits drank it!_

She put her hand over her mouth to stifle an unsteady, half-laughing breath at the thought.

Thank God Vaughn hadn't heard her crying earlier, but then again, maybe it would have been a mercy if he had? If he had come in and demanded to know why she was so helplessly sobbing, to know what was going on, she would have had to tell him. There would have been no time to think of excuses, no time to fear the consequences of telling the truth and thus invent evasions, she would have had to come clean. But he hadn't come in. Instead, engrossed in the game, Vaughn had merely called through a vague hello, one of those casual contacts that couples make, not really interested in the response, just an acknowledgement of their togetherness. She'd gotten herself together enough to be able to fob him off with a few similarly meaningless noises of her own and had managed to squeeze out the words 'reading' and 'book' from her swollen throat. In the other room Vaughn had nodded absently and had sunk back into the match.

She had bought herself time to think, and so she sat at the breakfast counter, almost serene in comparison to what had gone before, as composed as she could be in the circumstances. She was determined that she was no longer going to run from her real feelings, she was going to open them up and look at them properly.

_When had it all gotten so fucked up between she and Sark?_

Sitting in the kitchen Sydney had made a deal with herself. She'd taken a jar of coffee beans down from a shelf, and every time she told herself a lie, or evaded the true issue, she was going to take one out and put it in a pile. That way, at the end of it, she could see just how big a liar she really was. She took a bean from the jar and started the pile.

She'd been evading the issue, it hadn't gotten fucked up _between_ she and Sark, she'd gotten fucked up _about_ Sark. Saying it had gotten fucked up between them was implying that he shared the blame for the mess she was in. And that was a deception, just another way of hiding another truth from herself: that the mess she was in was all of her own making.

Sark, she suspected, had never gotten fucked up about her, at S-D6 and even before he had always been unafraid to show his attraction. That was the mess really. Not that she was deeply fascinated by a known assassin who was an enemy of the nation and the personal enemy of almost everyone she knew - no, she could have handled that - the mess was that she had unremittingly lied to herself about what she had felt.

_Oh God, why hadn't I just reached out to him at SD-6?_

He'd given her so many chances while he'd been there, he'd taken all the rejections and slaps she'd given him and had just kept holding his hand out to her. He had metaphorically held his hand out to her time and again, and she had knocked him back at every single instant. And she hadn't even wanted to! Why had she been so afraid to let him in? She had _wanted_ to get to know him and be his friend. She had _wanted_ to let him take her into that emotional safe harbour she sensed he was capable of providing, _but she'd been too scared of what people might say even to try for it!_

And he'd been so polite to her all the way through. Held out his hand towards her so many times, and she'd been such a relentless bitch to him … With his endless self-confidence and social poise he could have faced down any difficulties that might have arisen for them. Unafraid of what others thought of him he was above the common care of what 'people' might think.

He would have hacked out a space for them, he would have _made_ it happen!

Sydney gave way to quiet sobbing again as for the first time she saw all her lost chances strewn behind her.

That time he'd made her a 'comprehensive offer'? She should have made _him_ one, that he join her working for the good-guys instead of she join him working for the bad. Her father would have helped her, he would have _forced_ a government pardon for him!

And the last time she'd seen him, just yesterday on that road in Switzerland when he'd stared straight at her and not shot her? The worst part of it was the expression on his face. Underlying the professional impassivity there had been a vague smudge of hurt and disappointment, as though some deep and hidden part of him, hidden even from himself, had felt injured by her, as though she'd somehow let him down.

Sydney wiped her tearstained face with the flat of her hand and tried to control her ragged, shaky breathing.

If only she'd been more brave. If she had just claimed her courage and reached out to Sark when she'd had the chance, then their lives could have now been totally different.

At the recognition of it she broke down again. Stifled sobs wracked her. Parts of her mind crumbled. All the defensive architectures she'd built up over the years, all her righteous strictures and certainties, fractured.

When finally unbound, love takes no prisoners.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13: Veney **– _a practice bout or mock combat._

A continent away, James and Sark landed at dusk at an utterly deserted airfield outside Moscow. There had been just enough daylight to get them down without landing lights. Good, thought Sark, they wouldn't have to wait too long before dark. They now had about fifteen minutes of half-light left. Sark wanted to wait until nightfall as then, when he blew up the plane, the fireball would be all the more easy to spot. He was counting on it.

They stood on the field, just the two of them. Sark was dressed in his customary black, his suit topped by a long, black duster that hung from him casually - like a cloak. James appraised him.

"You look like Dracula."

Sark looked down at himself, all dressed in black, elegant as the night, and sniggered. He looked up again with a sudden, stifled snort of laughter, "Hey, 'The Prince of Sarkness'."

"Jeez," James closed her eyes, "sometimes I swear that you are about _ten_."

Sark had high-handedly cuffed her to him, wrist to wrist. Even so, her fighting spirit in the aircraft seemed to have been spent and she seemed to have accommodated to him, or maybe she was just too exhausted to fight any longer? Either way, having been uprooted across two continents, she seemed somehow resigned.

In the dark of the airfield there was nowhere for her to run, but cuffing her hammered home her subordinate position. He wanted her to know exactly who was in charge here and how little option she had, he wanted her to know it and to accept it and to obey him.

He suddenly had an unsettlingly heightened awareness that the cuffs left their hands only millimetres apart. James seemed to have mentally drifted off elsewhere, but Sark … he didn't know why, but he suddenly couldn't wrench his mind off the fact that if he just casually flexed his fingers then he would have her small hand in his possession. After all, she was his captive, she couldn't stop him. He buried his thoughts. He was relieved when she spoke.

"How's Aaron?"

He'd known she'd want reassurance on that matter and had downloaded hi-jacked satellite surveillance into his mobile. He got the phone out with his free hand and powered up the pictures, they clearly showed Sydney Bristow carrying a sleeping Aaron off a plane.

"He landed in L.A. 2.00 p.m. Pacific Standard time today. He'll be back with his mother by now." He paused, wondering for a second whether to continue. "Did you ever wonder where I kept him?"

James froze slightly before replying. "No." The inference being, 'no, and I don't want to know'.

Sark ignored the inference.

"I kept him at Disneyland Paris in the care of a wonderfully competent French Nanny; she thought she was caring for the child of a couple who were on a second honeymoon. Apparently he had a terrific time."

She turned to him with a look of stunned disbelief.

Sark manfully fought back a grin of self-congratulation and then his mind tripped him up with an unexpected calculation: James Dodgson was quite good-looking in her own strange way. He lurched back from the thought. _Fuck, where had that come from? _Confused, unwilling to engage with the idea, he unconsciously translated it into something that he could deal with instead. Half laughing to himself he wondered: what were his chances of pulling James Dodgson?

Whatever they were, he'd always liked a challenge. Besides, if they were going to be together for quite a while, he might as well make the game interesting.

Whenever Sark played poker, he always played for real money.

Whenever Sark played poker, he dealt the cards straight away.

"The Disneyland Paris thing is entirely true." He spoke smoothly, his gaze enveloping hers, lazily folding her into him. "I wouldn't say it if it wasn't." He curved a smile and looked away slightly, biting his lip when returning his gaze to her, smiling almost bashfully. He knew damn well it made him look irresistible. Then he hit her with a full-on assault of pure charm. "I'm not a complete monster Dr. Dodgson. There are just times when I simply have to behave like one."

He was rewarded by the sight of James jerking her glance away from him in a sudden welter of obvious confusion. He snagged the inside of his mouth to keep the grin off his face as he saw her colouring red, elatedly remembering a term from his Public School lessons in competition fencing: _first touch to me! _

He smirked up at the night sky: _Christ, but you can be a charming bastard when you want to be Sarkey!_

James remained silent, trying to take on board the new information Sark had given her – trying to take on board this new Sark it presented. Sark sensed she was struggling with her thoughts and decided to take advantage: after all, that was what he did best. He flicked her a wickedly playful look. Yep, she was still wrestling with her confusion. _Time to slide on in there Sarkey _…

"Well, I notice you haven't asked about Graham." He slid her a teasing sideways glance, "not interested in what happened to him then?"

He saw her continue to look away – confused - her face blushing ever more scarlet. A grin kept tugging away at the corners of his mouth. His voice purred playfully. "Marriage not going as well as it might be is it?" He shook his head in mock concern, keeping the pressure up. "I mean, I do recall you inviting me to torture him for his infidelity at one point."

James looked across at him, feeling a combination of confusion and an affronted hurt. "What? It isn't enough for me to be kidnapped, I gotta give you my _life story_ as well?"

Sark laughed. "Well, I'd be fascinated to hear it." He made a charmingly inept effort at Day Time TV sincerity. "Is there anything you want to share with us? Uncle Sarkums is listening."

James looked at him in disbelief.

"'_Uncle Sarkums'?" _ She gave a jerky, nervous laugh at the absurdity. _Uncle?_ He was obviously so much younger than she. Looking at him she felt her gaze sinking into his own as it shamelessly held hers and then, as someone who can suddenly feel themselves drowning, she tore hers away. She felt a strange rush of blood in her ears, a weird pulse in her throat - and then her mind self-protectively switched tack on her and she blurted out, "Oh okay, I admit it, that marriage of mine is totally _over_!"

As the words left her, it was as though she'd abruptly put down a heavy bag. She may have blurted out that truth as an effort to distract herself from something else she wasn't prepared to think about, but it was still a truth. It was as though her admission had expunged something, as though she'd finally exhaled a breath she had been holding ever since she'd first knew that the marriage had been a mistake.

_God, what a relief to say it_ – _even if it is only to Sark!_

Actually, she realised it was very easy to say it to Sark, because apart from that Rambaldi crap he had so few expectations of her. She warmed to her theme.

"And the thing is," – now she had started taking she saw no reason to stop – "that I've _asked_ him for a divorce – twice! Well, not so much asked as stood there in the driveway screaming I wanted one. Anyway, I never got very far, he'd always talk me round or just not talk about it at all, so we … I dunno … we just carried on being married." She kicked a pebble and mooted it to herself, puzzled. "It's strange really. I mean, deep down he doesn't even like me. You'd think someone was holding a gun to his head, making him stay married."

Regarding her profile against the darkening light, Sark idly decided that when this was all over he might just beat the crap out of Graham Caplan.

James looked at him sideways. "How the hell old are you anyhows?"

Sark wasn't blind-sided by the disconnected question. He didn't drop her gaze but held it with his and said slowly, "Oh, old enough."

James' gaze jerked away from his again as though he'd poked her with a finger. Sark was smirkingly sure that it was from embarrassment. She spoke up, still looking away.

"Why are you in this business?"

Sark caught his breath. Okay, that one had blind-sided him. He hadn't been expecting such a direct question. But then again, he was dealing with James Dodgson, what else could he expect _but_ 'direct'? What could he say in response? _I was sent to school at a very young age. Out of necessity one becomes self-reliant … and perhaps prematurely ambitious. I'm like anyone Dr. Dodgson, what I want is that which I never had._ But what exactly was '_that which I never had'_? Power? Control? Something else? He'd never really stopped to think. So what he said instead was, "Well, seeing how I'd been given the best education money could buy in lying, spying and mayhem, it did seem rather a shame to waste it."

His tone was debonair, amused.

James looked across at him and rolled her eyes. "Oh you are such a bullshitter! Are you actually trying to imply some school for spies?"

Sark gave a low, amused chuckle. He didn't mention Project Birthday. He didn't want to. He had learned not to allow himself to dwell on that part of his past, the part where he'd been robbed of his future; doing so just filled him with an uncomfortable guilty resentment toward Irina. Devotion and resentment: the two primary emotions he had for her, both warring on a battleground of guilt. Devotion because she'd saved him from Project Birthday, resentment because she was part of the reason it had existed in the first place.

Looking down at James in the dark of the abandoned airfield, he suddenly realised that she should have been an American version of himself: a Project Christmas child. Should have been, but hadn't. The slack attitude to registering her birth, the confusion about her age, her boy's name on a little girl's birth certificate, her haphazard schooling, it had all combined to one effect: in their search for special little children whose lives they could destroy, World Governments had missed her. She, unlike he, had slipped the net. He wondered, just how many more of them were out there, 'Project' candidates who'd escaped? Children who had gone uncaptured because their parents had been powerful and wealthy enough to resist, or had been so poor that they'd been off radar? Those protected by great privilege or great poverty: beyond reach or beneath notice? What about those who had been born before or after 'Christmas time', protected by an arbitrary few years either way? What about those children who had been scooped up but had been let go, deemed as 'not actionable' because they were seen as not ruthless enough? He supposed no-one would ever know.

James snapped him out of his reverie by indicating his mobile; looking down at her he saw that her face wore it's characteristic expression of screwed-up query. "Who's the woman in the picture, the one who helped Aaron?"

Sark looked at the phone in his hand as though surprised to still see it there. The image of Sydney had long since faded from the screen. He put the mobile away. Sydney Bristow? Who was she to him really? For some reason lately, he just didn't seem to care that much anymore.

"Who is she?" He shrugged politely, expressing an urbane indifference, "She's no-one."

He reached for a gadget in his pocket and pressed a button on it, and small pieces of destroyed jet rained down from a fireball that burst up into the black night sky.

_Well, she's not exactly no-one, _he thought resentfully,_ but right now the sainted Miss Sydney Bristow can eat my dust!_


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14: The 'Bill Of Challenge' To 'Playing The Prize'**

_Bill of Challenge - a formal announcement that an English student is ready to "Play" for his "Prize"._

_Playing the Prize - the testing of a student for advancement in the English schools of Defence, when the student decides they are ready to move to the next level._

Back in her kitchen, Sydney was still mulling over the issue of she and Sark. It had gone one o'clock in the morning and she was still there, with Vaughn now sleeping soundly on the sofa in the next room.

She hadn't done with her thoughts and emotions about Sark yet, or else they hadn't done with her; either way it had been a long night and it still wasn't through.

She looked down at the countertop before her, on it was a surprisingly small heap of coffee beans. She'd answered herself more bravely than she thought she could. And they hadn't been easy questions either.

Well, except for when she'd hit two seconds where she could take no more and had crapped out with, _so,_ _Sydney Bristow, what is your favourite colour? - Pink!_

She counted the beans, seven of them. All representing hardball issues and queries connected with Sark that she'd tried to duck and had then had hauled herself up on, forcing herself to address them. Without even thinking about it she knew she'd always keep them tucked away in a drawer somewhere, and that whenever she came across them, even if years from now, she'd remember this night. The night when she had changed herself, admittedly prompted by a man who regularly pointed guns at her, but she had changed.

The first 'hardball' was one she had already gone over fully in her mind, the one where she'd tried to put a portion of the blame on to Sark for the fact that she'd fucked up part of her life. Implying _they'd_ fucked it up, when really _she_ had. The others had occurred after, but were pretty much on the same theme, when she'd been trying to back-slide and deny her own culpability in how things had turned out, or deny how she truly felt.

Sydney had to admit it, she may have been brave, but she was also capable of being a stubborn, childish, self-deceiving, back-sliding, heel-digging little drag-ass.

_Wow,_ _do I ever suck!_

She absently pushed a bean about with her finger.

She was composed now, the sore puffiness and scarlet blotches caused by her sobbing had faded. She was able to go back over her thoughts without breaking down. And she _was_ going to go back over her thoughts, she was going to do it before she slept, she was determined to. She wanted to cement her thoughts into place so she couldn't disown them in the morning. But also – she bit her lip in a foolish grin – she'd spent so long denying any feelings for Sark at all, that it was fun now to just be able to think about him.

She looked down at the particular bean she was sliding about with her forefinger and laughed to herself. Now, was this the bean where she'd tried to tell herself that she'd never lead Sark on, that her falling for him was all his fault for being so damn persistent? Or was it the one where she'd denied to herself that she'd been actually physically attracted to him at all, but had only ever admired him as a human being?

Sydney bit her lip to stop herself from blurting out with laugher at how absurd that last one had been, and then covered her mouth when she failed so that the noise wouldn't wake Vaughn.

At the thought of Vaughn, she was jumped by guilt.

Vaughn. Sleeping there. Trusting. Just in the next room. Yeah, well, fuck it. She could and no doubt would go back to tortured guilt tomorrow, but tonight she was going to take a rest from martyrdom and spend some time with Sark, even if it was only in her memories. After an age of agonised self-denial, she'd earned the break.

Where would she start? She pushed the bean with her finger, might as well make this the 'I never lead Sark on bean' after all she giggled, and start from there.

Sydney laughed at herself over how ridiculous she'd been earlier: _I never lead Sark on! _Yeah, right, sure I didn't.Oh please, I had the slavering hots for him from the start! In fact, where was the start? It was right from the very moment she'd first seen him spank the ass off the K-Directorate criminal organisation in a desolate factory in Moscow. She'd been hanging from a harness outside – snooping – when she'd seen a blond boy in financial negotiation for a Rambaldi artefact. He'd been alone, representing The Man against the head of K-Directorate, his lieutenants and bodyguard. The deal had suddenly gone pear-shaped and for a second or so she had thought the blond boy was a dead man.

Hanging there, she'd known a moment of absolute panic.

Something in her had frozen up, horrified, wanting to shriek out and stop them – as even then in the first few seconds, before she'd even seen him properly, she felt some connection with him. And then she realised she didn't have to worry about him, ever, because with one imperious arch of an eyebrow he'd motioned the bodyguard to promptly shoot his own boss, leaving Sark to finish the deal with the man whom he summarily appointed as the next head of K-Directorate.

Hanging from the harness in the alleyway outside, Sydney had watched a charismatic, fearless, beautiful young man be totally ahead of the game. She'd been instantly grabbed by the crotch and hadn't been let go.

She leant forward resting her head on the counter top, helpless with silent laughter at her own summary of events. Grabbed by the crotch! _Oh dear God, it was so wonderful just to be able to admit it! Even if it was only to herself._

When was the next time she'd seen him? Easy! That time they'd beat the crap out of each other with latajangs! It had been in broad daylight this time, and she'd seen him full on. He'd been so arresting she'd not been able to stop herself from staring! A beautiful, blond, blue-eyed, prince of espionage.

The thing was, that although she'd been in heavy disguise – she was wearing a veil dammit – she had just known that he knew it was her! She had no idea even now of how he'd known, but she knew he had. As he'd baited her to do battle to prove that she was who she claimed, it was the faintly smirking, cocky way he'd come at her, relishing the prospect of combat with her.

He'd been playing with her – the grinning devil!

She was breathless at the memory.

It had been wonderful! The sheer unbridled physicality of just going straight flat at each other! Each knowing the other was good enough not to get hurt! Either of them could have won, but she had. He'd crashed flat on his back and had lain there looking up at her as she looked down at him, both of them heaving for breath. The look on his face! His gaze had been a private joke, a hot, laughing, unspoken challenge: _Get down here and do me._ _You know you want to!_

Dixon, S-D6 and the CIA had promptly crashed the ball. Sark had escaped of course, despite being handcuffed to a wrought iron gate – no shit, really? Yes, he'd managed to outwit an entire Russian mob organisation, but a pair of handcuffs? – yeah, that was really going to stop him!

And after that? Sydney caught her breath. After that was when she'd _encountered_ him in a Paris nightclub, with her posing as a vampish cabaret singer.

Her mission objective had been to get a recording of Alexander Khasineau's heartbeat, the Deputy of The man's organisation. Alexander Khasineau? He should have been renamed Alexander Khasin-Who , because instead of properly concentrating on him she'd taken the opportunity to - and there was no other phrase for it, and why should she need one anyway in the privacy of her own mind? - to feel up Sark! She bit her lip in glee, loving the memory of it. And at the time she had been in such full-on vamp-drag that she wasn't sure he'd actually recognised her. The possibility of him not knowing who she was had given her an enormous thrill, she'd felt freed of her own identity and thus released to do whatever she wanted. Even recalling it now, she swore she could still feel the tingle in her fingers from the memory of – under cover of her vamp routine - having wilfully trailed them across his chest, up along his neck, over his face and into his hair.

She had felt an incredible sense of power as she saw that she had him so turned on.

After that had come the incident that had showed them all just how smart he really was – his brilliant out-manoeuvring of Sloane's trick with the adulterated wine. Sloane had put a tracer on Sark via a radio-active iodide in wine the two men had drunk, which had then filtered into Sark's bloodstream, 'marking' him. Sark had not only figured that out, but figured out how to get round it: blood transfusion.

And then he'd gone and blown it all, he'd tortured Will.

Sydney got a grip on herself. Okay, she'd been through this earlier tonight. Time to go through it again, even if only to fix it in her head. Earlier, she had earned another bean by trying to use what Sark had done to Will as an excuse to justify the way she had subsequently treated Sark.

Well that was bullshit.

Sark and Will were nothing to do with she and Sark. And besides, Will and her dad had deliberately posed Will as a player, and players took the lumps. Dad had done it for his own advantageous reasons, and Will had done it because … because Will had wanted to impress her.

Sydney recalled an uncomfortable instance earlier in her self-questioning, where she'd been honest to herself straight off about Will's feelings for her and so didn't have cause to have eight beans on the counter instead of seven. Will may have started seeing Francie, but he was attracted to she, Sydney, and Sydney knew it. The knowledge of his attraction made her uncomfortable, but it wasn't something she had to deal with upfront often, so she usually ignored it, instead buying into their mutually deceiving game of: _Hey, isn't it great? We're a guy and a gal who are just friends and neither of us wants to have sex with the other!_

What a crock!

She was astonished at just how often guys pulled that play: _I'm your friend, I'm not trying to get into your panties, no really!_ Usually with a woman they knew they had no chance with, and so angling the friendship thing was the best they could hope for. Well, guess what, the chick always knew, even if she didn't say.

Will was using their friendship as a prop to keep the door open in the hope of something else, and she was letting him do it because his want for her made him easy, unchallenging company.

She suspected that was another reason why she was so attracted to Sark. He didn't play that 'just friends' game. He may have been full of guile, but when it came to acknowledging his own nefarious aims she suspected he didn't have an ounce of self-deception in him.

Sydney knew that when Sark was physically attracted to a woman, he let her know. Unlike Will and countless other guys who feared to make themselves plain, Sark wasn't scared of rejection. It wasn't that he never expected to get it – she was living proof that he did - but that he would not let the fear of it see him waste a lifetime in hanging back. In his own way Sark went in for frank pursuit. He didn't manoeuvre women into relationships under the guise of 'friendship'. From her own experience she knew that when he was attracted to a woman Sark may not have broadcast it to the world but he made sure the woman concerned certainly knew, and he gave her the choice to say 'yes' or 'no'. Sydney knew for a fact that he took 'no' to mean no.

She thought back to the subject of Will.

_Well, no-one could really blame Sark for what had happened to Will. _

If Will had set himself up as a player, then nobody could complain when Sark had treated him like one. After all, torture and interrogation were part of the package, they all expected to get it and they all knew that both sides dealt it out. S-D6 had termed it 'having a talk in the conversation room' whilst in the CIA it was called _Going To_ _Camp Harris_.

Will hadn't been the reason why Sark deserved the way she had treated him, she hadn't behaved toward Sark like a cold High School Bitch because he'd 'deserved it' in any case. She knew she'd treated him like that because she'd been an emotional coward who was too scared not to.

She wanted justification for how she'd treated Sark in how he'd treated Will? She knew she couldn't even find it in how he'd treated her! What were the worse things he'd ever really done to her? That time in Siberia when he'd shot the ice out from under her, submerging her in lethally cold depths, was an accident. If she hadn't already immobilised him by slamming him in the leg with an ice-pick – causing his finger to jerk on the trigger in the first place – then he probably would have tried to rescue her!

She thought back. What else was there? Yep, that time with the acid shower in Paldiski. Oh please, she knew he was never going to let it eat at her skin. Well, she'd thought he wasn't going to. And when he'd had her scrubbed down naked afterwards? Looking back on it, he'd had to, to make damn sure not a drop of acid had gotten on her and incrementally damaged her.

There was only one thing he'd personally done to her that she thought was right next door to unforgivable. That thing no-one else knew about. She swallowed hard, unwilling to face up to it and look it over in her mind, it had been so humiliating.

_Oh, come on, you don't want another bean over a little thing like that do you?_

She blurted it out to herself: that damned geisha thing!

Even now she burned red-faced at the memory. How could he have said those things to her!

At the start of the Tokyo mission to take down Sloane he'd wished her luck and meant it. She, as usual, had gotten snippy, flatly insulting him with how she didn't need his luck. Thinking back on it, maybe she'd deserved what he had said later.

After she'd put Sloane out with a hypo shot and then screamed for an 'ambulance', Sark had arrived as they waited for it to come. They'd had a few minutes and had exchanged words. It would have looked strange if they had not. After all, they were supposed to be two concerned civilians caught up in the tragedy of a stricken man.

He had looked at her as she towered above all the other – genuine - geishas. She and they were dressed alike but next to their diminutive frames she'd stood out like a strapping race-horse amongst delicate fauns. She'd known it would be a dumb disguise, but no, the CIA had insisted! She and Sark had held a hissed conversation out of the corners of their mouths. She fully recalled it. Typically he had been flirtatious and charming and she curt and prim.

"_Sydney, can't you at least pretend to be shorter?"_

"_Shut up. I don't converse with assassins."_

"_No, you just have a mother who is one, a father who thinks like one, and although you wouldn't deign to have conversations with us, you're quite happy to choose us as lovers." _She'd given a guilty, questioning start, he didn't know, he - _ "Noah Hicks?" _he'd clarified,_ "Mr. Snowman? Remember him? Or have there been so many of us bad-boys that you've simply lost track? For such a nice girl, I hear you were more than happy to leap into the sack with Frosty."_

"_I didn't know!"_

"_Oh that's what all you Professional Virgins say." _

Professional virgin? _"Any more out of you Mister and I swear to God, I'll whack you with the left-overs from Sloane's little shot!"_

"_Oh look Sydney, that man over there's staring at you. Maybe he thinks you're too tall for a geisha? Why don't you crouch?"_

"Stop trying to make me look ridiculous!" 

"_I don't need to try. I leave that to the CIA." _Sark had turned to her, looking her fully up and down and explaining with a gentle shake of his head, _"Sydney, you look like a line backer in clown-face."_

She'd nearly decked him on the spot. Yeah, some geisha she'd make! Line backer? Okay, so she worked out, she had to, but … _line backer?_

She sat in the kitchen, retrospectively enjoying her anger at him, enjoying it because she knew she didn't really mean it: _that smirking blond bastard!_

Anything else that had happened, Vaughn being exposed to that virus, all the ambushes and shoot-outs Sark had inflicted upon her, all the spying stuff? That was just work. But that geisha comment, that had been pure gratuitous insult!

Sitting in the kitchen, she growled to herself****that she didn't care for him,thatit was just a sex thing. Yeah, right. How very convenient she should tell herself that, like it wasn't the very issue of another one of her beans!

_Yeah, sure I don't care!_ She thought. _Sydney, quit lying to yourself!_

Like she hadn't been sick with worry for him that time in the Russian factory. That she hadn't been nauseous with fear when Sloane had captured him shortly after the latajang fight, picturing Sark being subjected to all manner of horrifying tortures in 'the conversation room' when in fact the two men had been sharing a bottle of wine. And when Sloane did have Sark in 'the conversation room' during Sark's time at S-D6, threatening him with torture after Sloane's failed mission in Kashmir? When Sydney had heard about that she'd frozen until she realised that Sark was safe – that he'd talked his way out of it. That, and hadn't she just been sobbing her heart out in the kitchen earlier on?

Yeah, sure I don't care! I don't care like Snow White isn't a virgin!

Which lead to another of her hardballs.

_That it wasn't even a sex thing, she didn't have a sex thing for Sark!_

Oh right, she had really been channelling her Inner Princess on that one: _I just admired his professionalism, _she had smugly told herself, _and wanted to be friends._

That was so ridiculous! Sydney's mobile face was creased with silent laughter, head propped in her hands, chest heaving with unvoiced giggles. Yeah, sure she wasn't panting after him! _Be still, be still, my beating crotch!_ She felt drunk, although she hadn't even had any alcohol.

_FAPSE headquarters anyone? Hot even in his ludicrous Russian guard's uniform?_

She'd been so stunned to see him in FAPSE that she'd been too shocked to get her High School Bitch act fully into place. He had attempted to make her a 'comprehensive offer'; in response she'd been almost witty for once saying that he was cute, but she'd pass.

She'd nearly blotted her copy book over that one when she'd gotten back to L.A., nearly shown up what she really felt. Over gossip with Vaughn she'd let him know about Sark's offer, barely suppressing her excitement while telling him that Sark reminded her of the good-looking guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer. Vaughn hadn't picked up on the inference. Good job she hadn't told Will, with his journalist's mind he'd have been all over it.

_Oooh – that time Sloane had said 'brief him' when she'd first seen Sark at S-D6 and she'd nearly giggled!_

_That time in the Gendarme car on their Paris op! _Okay, he'd been trapped in that ridiculous outfit with its absurd cloak … She laughed. Poor Sark! God he got stuck with some lousy outfits! With her photographic memory she could remember every inch and angle of his face and she could fully recall his appearance in the Gendarme's uniform he'd been forced into as a cover. But as he'd floored the accelerator that day and they'd escaped with the Echelon unit, silly-looking Gendarme's outfit or not, she'd taken one look at his intent, knowing face crouched over the steering-wheel and all she could think was that she was in a fast car with Sark, that they could go anywhere for the afternoon, and that disguised as a policeman he would have his very own pair of handcuffs on him!

_Oh God, when she'd driven him off the road when he was on his way to his first day at the S-D6 office. _She hadn't even known what she was going to say when she forced him over. She'd just seen his golden hair ahead of her and had roared to catch up, with no idea of what she'd do when she did. Boy, she'd really blown that one. It had been the ideal opportunity: they were out of the office, away from all eyes, removed from any roles they may have felt obliged to play, and they'd had the whole day ahead of them. He'd flirted with her, and what had she done? Yep, instantly skittered back behind her Bitch Princess routine, even though there was no-one there to see it.

Dear God, he'd looked so hot standing there. Bespoke black suit, blue shirt, blue tie, Oakleys on. Easy, smiling, confident. She swallowed at the memory.

Sitting in the kitchen she was suddenly convinced that beneath the glib surface charm he had displayed, he had actually cared for her then whether he knew it or not. She was suddenly sure that his veneer of bullet-proof charm had not been to disguise the fact that he did not care, but to hide the fact that he did. It was a mirrored reflective barrier, at once both camouflage and a Kevlar shell designed to stop anyone from getting to the real him beneath.

_What was she going to do if she ever saw him again?_

That had been another of her dodge-ball issues. She had tried to tell herself that she didn't want to see him again, which was complete crap - she did want to see him again, she just didn't know what she'd do when it happened.

Even the phrase 'if she ever saw him again' had been an evasion. They were bound to meet again. They were each the best field agent their respective sides had. Her side? The Free World, America and the CIA. His side? Mom, Sloane and anyone with the money. When each side wanted something badly, they tended to be the ones they sent in to get it. When both sides badly wanted the same thing at the same time? Odds were that Sark and Sydney would be flung into the mixer together. Again.

Meeting him wasn't the problem. The fact that there was little chance of any contact that didn't involve aiming guns at each other's heads was the problem. It wasn't exactly a set of circumstances that lent itself to casually inviting each other out for coffee. Well, whatever she did or said next time their paths crossed, at least she was determined not to allow herself to run and hide behind her adopted cold hard bitch routine as she had in the past. Even if people regarded her with misgivings afterwards she would not let Sark or herself down again by pretending she didn't care. She might not ever be able to tell him she did care, but she wasn't going to stand there and actively pretend that she didn't.

As she'd gone over her thoughts again, she'd moved the beans around the countertop, putting them in a nice, neat row. One bean was left, representing the toughest issue of all. Was she in love with Sark, or was it just a fascination with what she knew she shouldn't have? Who held her by the heart, Sark or Vaughn? The glittering, playful enemy, a man whom she sensed was at some level at war with his own emotions, or the man who was loving, and tried to be a solid prop?

Who did she most want? If she loved either of them, which one was it? She truly did not know.

She wasn't being evasive, she just couldn't answer. It was too big a question. There were too many sides to it. If she loved Sark, could they ever be together anyway? If she didn't love Vaughn, should they still be together in spite of the fact, just because he loved her?

Vaughn did love her, she knew that. Well, he loved his idea of her: Miss Perfect Princess. She thought back on all the things he'd done for her. He'd gone up against the Government's Rambaldi obsessives to spring her from them, putting his life and his personal freedom on the line and all for her. But behind it all, she knew he was fundamentally weaker than she. Not a bad man, just a weak one. Was it enough to be with someone just because they earnestly loved you, even if you might not love them?

She supposed Vaughn had always been looking for something to give himself form – did he now think he'd found it in her? Had he always been seeking some template he could base himself upon? Even coming in to the CIA had been an effort to emulate his dead father, rather than an effort to be himself. Was there any 'real' Vaughn? Was he just a collage of different facets which he highlighted as and when appropriate?

Just like herself in fact?

Was that another reason why she felt so pulled to Sark, that unlike Vaughn, Dad, Dixon – everyone actually – he didn't have this Miss Perfect Princess image of her that she had to live up to? It was as though everyone else seemed to need her to be perfect, so they wouldn't have to be.

Sydney knew that Sark could be coldly calculating, he was capable of great ruthlessness and an almost heartless disengagement from others; but she sensed he was also one of the most bluntly honest people she had ever met. Sark looked life flat in its ugly face and laughed straight at it; she knew he could accept the worst about her. What had she tried to keep hidden about herself anyway - her wild streak, her reckless abandon? Those things wouldn't bother Sark. He lived life full-on, he wouldn't be shocked that someone else might want to.

Who could she talk to? She had her heart and mind preoccupied with internationally wanted assassin! Who really knew her well enough to understand, or forgive, or just accept? Will? No such luck. Even if he could truly give unbiased advice regarding her attraction for another man, then the fact that the man was Sark - Will's much hated Cocky British Sonofabitch – would see him lie to her.

Francie? Maybe, a while back, but not now. Francie had grown somehow distant. Not surprising really, had she ever really let Francie know her? And not just Francie either; now that she really needed someone, was there really anyone who knew her? Probably not, but whose fault was that? After all, how had she ever let anyone really know her when she'd spent so much of her life hiding behind her greatest alias of all: The Perfect Miss Sydney Bristow?

Suddenly exhausted, she knew she could think no more and she straightened up from the kitchen counter. She wasn't sure quite who she really was now, not after tonight, but that was better than what she had been before, someone who thought she knew herself when she didn't.

She looked down at the stray bean on the countertop. She put it in her pocket and bagged up the others and put them away in a drawer as keepsakes. The one in her pocket was unfinished business.

When she went through to the other room she saw Vaughn fast asleep, head lying at a vulnerable angle against a cushion, utterly defenceless against the future.

She didn't wake him, but instead brought another blanket from the bedroom and lay herself down on the floor next to him, unconsciously wrapping herself up tightly in it, almost as though it were a cocoon, a tent. It was a habit she'd picked up somewhere in childhood and had never quite dropped.

She wasn't ruthless enough to split herself off from him by abandoning him and going separately to her room, but neither could she bear to wake him, knowing that he would then naturally follow her to her bed.

She was not hypocritical enough to share her bed with a man she was not sure she loved; well, not tonight.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15: Misura Larga To Misura Stretta** - _proceeding from out of range to in range, from a position where you cannot strike to one where you can._

When she'd stopped screaming in reaction to the explosion, James Dodgson had glared up at the highly amused Sark.

"Yeah, very funny pal. So what now Blond Guy?"

They were on a deserted airfield in the pitch black, warmed and lit only by the heat of an explosion and surrounded by nothing. No car, no welcoming crew, nothing.

"I don't get it. Where's our car?"

"Oh, I'm sure one will come along shortly."

One didn't come along shortly, lots did. The authorities, passers-by, scavengers, journalists, all were attracted by the Sark firework display. In the darkness Sark had a choice of vehicles he could steal. He took a SAAB. Reliable, fast enough to get them to where he was headed and inconspicuous enough to easily dump later – the ideal car for criminal activity. He uncuffed James to give himself freedom of movement. To forestall any last-ditch attempt at escape on her part he had told her the truth: they were in Russia now, the Wild West of the East, and that if she ran to the police it wouldn't help. In Russia the police were just another crime gang – one mention of his name, of the CIA, of who she was, and they'd be all over her.

"And to quote the great American saying, 'not in a nice way either'."

He drove them to a safe house he and Irina used in the centre of Moscow, gagged and rope-tied James there and then left and dumped the car. He returned on foot and released her.

She rubbed her wrists and flicked an angry glance up at him. "You know, if I didn't already suspect that you get some sick kick out of this bondage thing? – I'd be suspecting you get some sick kick out of this bondage thing!"

She turned away and took in her surroundings with curiosity. Sark gave a smirking grin, his gaze roving slowly over James, appraising her, thinking about the consensually vile things he'd done with certain women in the past.

S_ick kick out of this bondage thing? She has no idea._

He lead her further into the safe house, opening big double doors that took them deeper into the heart of it. She walked with chin tilted upwards, brows drawn together, looking about her. He watched her intently; she was so small he was able to look down on the top of her head. She was so tiny in comparison to a lot of the women he knew that the contrast delighted him. He decided it: okay, he was definitely going to go for the seduction. At older than he, and he suspected a lot smarter, she was just too much of a juicy little challenge to pass up.

For him sex was a candy store, and he was the kid in it.

At some level he knew she'd resist it, out of embarrassment and inhibition if nothing else. He almost wanted her to, somehow that just made it all the more alluring a prospect. For Sark, whether the mark was male or female, nothing could beat the twisted kick of manipulating a physical, emotional and sexual surrender when he knew that the person's intellect or sense of virtue had striven to fight him.

The easily available had always bored him.

Although he didn't enjoy fictional theatrics, he had attended the theatre on many occasions, either accompanying Irina or in pursuit of a victim. One of the plays he had sat through had actually caught his attention: _Les Liaisons Dangereuse. _He had grinningly recognised the character of Valmont as a bastard after his own heart.

His unwavering gaze followed James as she went in. He would have her and then, he shrugged to himself, no harm done he'd throw her back in the pond.

He quietly clicked the double doors shut behind them.

The safe house wasn't the usual bland box, it was a palace, literally. Irina had acquired an enormous suite in one of the old Romanov residences. Of the two of them, he had used it mostly; for some reason it had amused her to station him there. Their immense suite had been maintained well in their absence. Those paid to clean and tend it had never stopped being paid to do so, hence they had never stopped. Besides, they had met the owners - a soignée, elegant woman with the coiled intensity of a viper, and a steely young man with a smile that could cut you - they hadn't dared stop.

The place was warm but dimly lit. Full power was not yet on.

He re-acquainted himself with their surroundings. They were in the huge, high ceiling salon. Ornate, rococo plasterwork, gold-leaf, classically painted frescoed ceilings, deep red silk on the walls. Huge portrait mirrors reflected the dimmed lighting. The furniture was antique. Opulent veneers, intricate carvings, tortoiseshell boule-work, velvets and satins. Sark had always considered the furnishing and décor a little fussy for his tastes, but for some reason he had always felt at home in this safe-house. He felt somehow that the rooms were on his scale.

He suppressed an impish grin: if this didn't impress Dr. James Dodgson, nothing would. He smirked, "grand enough for you?"

She shrugged, "s'okay."

"Only _okay_?" He flicked her a look of teasing admonishment, he appeared playful but was determined to get a reaction.

"Oh alright, it's great. In fact, anyone but you here with me? – I'd be on vacation."

The pair had moved to the kitchen. Unlike the rest of the suite, it gleamed with modern appliances. Sark was rustling up omelettes. When setting out to seduce he had always found that cooking was good way to start: besides, goddammit, he was hungry.

He had changed out of his suit and into grey tracksuit bottoms, a dark grey T-shirt and bare feet. As he wore a suit with the casual air of a man wearing sweats, he wore sweats with the elegance of a man in a suit.

He chopped the vegetables, handling the knife with the bland assurance of a sous chef – or an assassin - and flicked a glance up at her. She sat nearby, chin propped on elbow, elbow propped on kitchen counter, staring blankly before her. Sark assessed her. _So, not that impressed huh?_ He felt somewhat disgruntled at the possibility. _Well let's see if you're 'not impressed' when I take you to my villa on Crete._ Sark caught himself up short. _What?_ His villa on Crete? No-one knew about that place, not even Irina, and he was thinking of dragging Dodgson there? Just how crazy was he? He really _did_ need a break!

"I'm not really that hungry," James spoke up in a small voice.

Sark realised that his 'cooking as seduction' technique wasn't having the desired effect. He felt almost unwarrantedly vexed. His knife paused in mid-chop and he looked across at her. "We're eating this. I'm not going to all this effort to have you turn it down. And don't give me any nonsense about 'giving it to the starving children in Africa' either."

Sitting slightly to the rear of him James looked up at his back and huffed, beginning to silently mimic him behind his back, exaggeratedly miming his words. _'I'm not going to all this effort to have you turn it down'_.

"And stop skitting my accent."

James was open-mouthed, half aghast, half amazed – how could he have seen?

"And yes," Sark continued, "I do have eyes in the back of my head."

He was still angry. _Showing her Crete? Just how mad was that?_

He looked back at her, curving an arched brow over his shoulder - _paying attention to me now are we James?_ – and saw that the answer was 'no'.

She was sitting lackadaisical, picking blankly at the countertop with a finger.

She sighed. She wasn't cuffed, she wasn't tied or restrained, she was surrounded by readily available weapons – _frying pan anyone? Woman's weapon of choice world-wide! _– but she couldn't rustle up the energy to attack him or try to escape. She had finally realised that there was just no point in doing so without a proper weapon, like a gun. Without one, even if she got the jump and he actually had his back turned, she'd still get brought down before she did any damage: he was just too good.

"Did you actually want to marry him?"

She jumped slightly at the question and even Sark was surprised to hear himself ask it. He didn't know where on earth the words had come from, or why he wanted to know. His knife paused again as he waited for the answer.

She looked up at him. "I'm not gonna get out of telling my life story after all, am I?" She shrugged. "Why did I marry him? I dunno. I mean, I guess I didn't wanna end up dying alone eaten by stray cats, and he was a good looking guy, attentive and all, so … when he asked me I said yes. I mean, it wasn't like anyone else was interested."

He flicked her a look as she gazed away into the mid-distance. _Oh they were interested alright, they were just too scared to show it._ He still felt a vague annoyance at her lack of attention to him.

Her ignoring him was something he had not expected. He didn't like it.

As well as omelettes, he had whipped up a desert of chocolate mousse which was setting in a bowl on the countertop. Cutting a sly look sideways at her he dipped a finger-tip in it and scooped out a tiny dollop. When intending to seduce, he didn't waste time and he allowed no sanctuary. He interrupted her as she was talking.

"James?"

She turned her face to him only to be met by his fingertip an inch from her mouth; his gleaming yet fractionally cold gaze pinned her. "Taste this for me will you, and tell me if it's ready?"

James' conversation jolted to a halt. Sark's instruction had been delivered as half request but also half order. What? He wanted her to do what? – he wanted her to put his finger in her mouth? Her gaze stumbled about in embarrassment, trying to look at anything that wasn't Sark's face. In turn, Sark didn't need to be a genius to sense her obvious, confused resistance, and he pushed slightly, still holding his finger under her nose. "Well, go on," he prompted sinuously, and then offered a slight challenge, "you're not scared are you?" His voice was soft, purring, but with the tiniest sliver of ice. "What do you think I'm trying to do, poison you?" Her mouth opened slightly, but more in perplexity than acquiescence, she was still resisting him by simply not acting. To Sark, resistance really _was_ futile. He ratcheted his voice up a notch so his words were now far more of an order than a request. "Do it," he instructed.

Beaten down by his sudden shocking change of tone, she dipped her head, taking his finger into her mouth to taste, her lips and tongue tugging tentatively at him.

Sark stopped a gasp in his throat.

Her soft, velvety tugging seemed to pull a wire in him. He jolted as a current of energy flashed through him, firing along his nerves, tightening his breathing in his chest. He mindlessly took a half-step towards her, sliding his finger out of her mouth and gripping her jaw line in one hand, intent on pushing his tongue into her instead.

She half started back, round eyed, more than a little scared.

Sark caught himself up short, shocked – _what the fuck?_ Startled at himself he abruptly returned to the chopping board and seized up the knife, burying himself in his previous activity, trying to cut through a welter of confusion in his head as to what had just happened.

_What the fuck did you think you were doing Sarkey? You were scaring her! Hell, _he thought, _I was scaring myself! _

For Sark sex was an almost objective exercise, a game of dominance and control, it was something he did _to_ someone, not something he did _with_ someone – or worse – something that sucked him down into some mutual delirium. Mr. Sark didn't do delirium, much less the mutual type. But for a few seconds there he knew he'd nearly lost it. As she'd tugged on him he'd felt – he slammed the door on what he might have felt. He resumed slicing in a frantic rhythm, trying to ignore the jumping heartbeat in his chest, hoping that if he simply ignored the alarming, overwhelming _pull_ he had felt toward her that somehow he could pretend it had never happened.

James was equally panicked. She continued gabbling, reminiscing wildly to subsume her embarrassment and alarm. "There was this one guy though that I really liked? He was in my Quatzecoatl class at college? His name was Marshall. He was so smart - "

Sark turned to her. "What? Flinkman? Marshall _Flinkman_?"

James looked at him. "Yeah. Do you know him?"

"We've met," Sark glared, "he works for the CIA." He caught her horrified glance and spat out, "oh for Heaven's sake, he's still alive." Honestly, did she think he killed _everyone_ he met?

"The CIA huh? That sounds really … cool."

Sark snorted in utter disgust as he resumed chopping.

"Well it ain't that bad," she continued, still gabbling to try and get past the embarrassment of what had just occurred between them. "In fact, you know I once got interviewed by the NSA?" Sark looked up sharply at her words, "I mean, not to become a spy or anything," she continued hurriedly. "They were just tellin' me that with my line of work and such that I might be approached by the Russians or enemies of the state or somethin'. I think it was to forewarn me." She looked at Sark and then indicated their current situation, "not that it did any good, obviously."

"Obviously!"

Sark felt unaccountably snappy, he was slicing vegetables like a man on a mission. _Marshall Flinkman? She fancied Marshall bloody Flinkman?_

"Well … how did he turn out? Marshall I mean."

"What?" Sark barked, distracted. "Oh. Married! With two children!"

All lies as Sark knew, but hey, even Marshall had to get lucky one day.

James' voice was small as she took in the news that her college crush was off the market. "Oh, right." But then she straightened in her seat, brightened and said firmly, nodding to herself, "well, I'm happy for him – I'm glad things turned out well with him."

Sark was scarcely listening as she went on, he hardly saw the chopping block as he furiously drummed away with the knife. His thoughts of his previous actions were buried under a slew of astonished anger that she might actually fancy Marshall Flinkman. _Flinkman? Marshall Bloody_ _Flinkman_? As if! Did she have any idea how gorgeous she was? Not that Marshall wasn't a nice guy in his own way, Sark quickly reminded himself, but for God's sake there were limits!

Well, he could be ten times more charming than Marshall Flinkman, and he was about a thousand times better looking! There was no way he could miss, he –

His own voice interrupted him.

"Would you like to hear my James Bond, Sean Connery impression?" His urbane tone betrayed nothing of his irritated thoughts.

She looked at him, surprised and not a little suspicious, wishing she could back away from him slightly. "Er … no?"

"I thought you did. Here it comes.' He cleared his throat. " 'Miss Moneypenny'." He said it in his own voice and without attempting even a trace of Scottish accent.

After a long second, in which Sark found himself tense, not quite sure what James' reaction was going to be, Doctor James Dodgson jolted with a peal of surprised laughter.

And then the front doors to the suite blew in.

_Author's note_: the 'Quatzecoatl class' reference is taken from Evoness' great Sarkney fic, _Salvation._ In it, Marshall refers to a girl he had a crush on at college, where he took classes in Quatzecoatl only because she attended them. Of course, Marshall being Marshall he never actually _spoke_ to her.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16:** **Attack-From-Inaction** – _an attack delivered quickly from a relatively still position without prior action or preparation_.

Later that same night Sark congratulated himself on managing to appear sanguine with the muzzle of a Sig Sauer resting between his eyes.

Well, he always had specialised in bored disdain.

Yep, sometimes even the best laid plans of mice, men and Mr. Sark got fucked in the head. And just when it had all been going so_ well _too.

In response to the doors blowing in, Sark's and James' reactions were immediate and indicative. Sark swivelled toward the sound, poised, analysing: _well, nothing like blundering amateurs for needlessly announcing their arrival. _James leapt six inches out of her seat and shrieked.

Sark immediately clamped a hand over her mouth, holding up one finger of his other hand for silence as he gazed toward the kitchen door, toward the direction of the noise. He risked a quick look at her. Did she think it was the CIA, when he was damn sure it wasn't? Would she scream for help if he took his hand away, thus giving away their position?

He felt the gasps of her breath and the texture of her open mouth beneath the fleshy palm and was unnerved at how immediate the sensations felt to him, he furiously told himself to ignore them. If he was to get them both out of this, he had to focus on the task, to drive his mind forward like a sharp, steel point. Holding her steady, he brought his mouth close to her ear.

"In case you're wondering," he muttered quickly, "that won't be the CIA coming to rescue you. They'd never openly storm a place with a hostage inside, not without trying stealth first. Whoever has just come through those doors is not on your side. I have a lot of enemies in Russia, and as you're with me, so do you. I do hope you understand that Doctor, because I'm going to take my hand away now and if you scream and give away my position, I'm going to abandon you and leave you to them."

Still clamping his hand over her mouth he shifted his head back slightly to stare at her, his cool blue gaze that of a Roman Emperor who had just issued the Imperial Decree.

Would she buy that totally empty threat?

He hoped his gaze gave away nothing of his doubts. It didn't. It hardly ever did. She stared back, seeing instead only his arrogant certainty. She nodded in acquiescence. He removed his hand, she did not scream.

They gazed at each other for some seconds. Her face may have been screwed up in annoyed alarm and his showing only a display of blank arrogance, but each recognised that, for however short a period and however unlikely the prospect, an alliance had just been formed between them against a common foe.

Sark moved to the huge fridge and pressed a hidden switch at the side. The whole thing swung out away from the wall, revealing an ancient secret passageway which had been part of the fabric of the original building.

There had always been spies in the world, even in the eighteenth century.

Sark motioned James ahead of him. On her way in she paused and reached out a hand, ignored a block of sharp knives and instead armed herself with a heavy frying pan she pulled from a hook on the wall. Sark eyed the block of knives she'd neglected. He wasn't surprised at her decision to leave them, in his experience almost all women instinctively hated knives as weapons, there was something of an almost biological imperative about it. The only woman he'd ever met who automatically went for a knife in a fight was Irina – well, Irina and Allison Doren. Sark recalled Allison, the freelance operative he had once worked closely with, Allison had liked knives alright.

Sark reckoned James' selection of a frying pan might have been a slightly comic one, but clocking the blunt instrument he saw it was an effective choice; it was easy to wield and subconsciously she wouldn't see it as an automatically lethal weapon, so she wouldn't be afraid to use it full on. Realising she'd effectively armed herself with a heavy bludgeon, Sark decided to reinforce the point about just whose side she was on.

He bent his mouth to her ear as they moved through the opening, so quiet he was almost breathing his words into her. "Doctor, just to remove any doubt about where your loyalties lie," even as quiet as it was, his voice was almost musical, urbane, conversationally pleasant, but still with a steely edge, "you attack me with that thing and I'll visit so much pain and suffering upon you, they'll set up web-sites about it."

James shivered, moving into the dark, but still whispered back. "Sweet-talker."

They went in, closing over the fridge behind them.

Sark took them through the internal warren of secret passages, moving toward the salon where the noise was coming from. He wanted to find out what was going on. He moved aside a small shield on the wall and looked through a peephole. Seven men, each heavily armed with automatic rifles fitted with silencers.

Well, who'd have thought it, that the remnants of K-Directorate could be so petty? How long since he'd decapitated their organisation - after which it had quickly fallen into warring factions - and they were still sore about it? Some people just didn't know when to quit.

He let James take a look, just so she'd know for sure that the men were not there to help her. Upon seeing the outlaw gang she gave a faint gasp and took a half step back, she was sure alright.

One of the pieces of advice the FBI gave it's agents of which Sark approved was that in the face of conflict, either withdraw or fire. Sark decided to withdraw. He knew who the men were, he could kill them later, and seven was too many to take on right now, particularly with James there.

The passage was lit by the dimmest of lights, the dull beams that broke in through the narrow vertical cracks that demarcated the secret doors that lead off it into rooms. That the light could come through was alarming proof to Sark of just how thin the barrier was between he and the bad guys. He caught James' attention in the near dark and motioned her with a jerk of his head, they moved further down the passage. Sark knew there was an out further along, all they had to do was get to it, quietly leave and boost a car. Sark's sense of humour pre-disposed him to stealing their assailants' own. It would serve them right.

Then came the obstacle to his plans, literally. The suite had been tended well, in as far as those caring for it could see, but its age had betrayed it in covert ways. Part of the ancient crumbling passageway had collapsed and they couldn't get past the blockage or clear it without making enough noise to alert their attackers. That would give away their location, and with the weapons their enemies were carrying Sark calculated an unpleasant likelihood that he and James could simply be gunned down through the walls.

You win some, you lose more.

Sark recalled the old FBI maxim, 'withdraw or fire'. Was there a third option for them? Could they just stay where they were and wait it out? No, they'd left too much evidence of their recent presence in the kitchen, their assailants would know they were in the apartment, and if they couldn't find them then out of sheer frustration they'd just start shooting the place up and bulleting through the walls. They'd be shot then anyway. Okay, so they couldn't withdraw and couldn't hide, so 'fire' it had to be then. He looked down at James, just able to discern her face in the low light. How would she take it? He saw that her mouth was a compressed line as she looked at the impassable barrier before them, it might have been to stop her lips trembling, but it also might have been sheer annoyance. If it was the latter, then he knew just how she felt; he hated it when a perfectly good plan fell apart. She looked up at him and raised her dark, arched brows, her question clear: _what now Blond Guy? _

Sark considered. He didn't want to use the passageway to go creeping about the suite, as the longer this went on, the worse their chances. Sooner or later, they were going to get caught. Right now, they still had the element of surprise as to their exact location. Okay, time to use it.

He answered James' unspoken question with a sudden, gleeful, ferocity. _What were they going to do?_ "We're going to shoot it out, that's what!" he hissed.

So, part of him hated it when a perfectly good plan fell apart and forced him into a wild, gunslinging improvisation – well, guess what, for the first time he cared to consciously admit it, another part of him _fucking loved it!_

He was grinning like a buccaneer about to take a navy vessel.

James closed her eyes, a clear expression of: _oh shit no._ "A shoot out?" she hissed, shaking, "_but I've got a frying pan!_"

Sark smirked. "Hardly my fault if you Americans never dress appropriately for the occasion."

They shifted down the passageway, back toward the salon.

Sark had a full clip already loaded in his ankle-holstered gun, plus a spare. Fine, but not enough. He doubted the ballistic capacity of his handgun was enough to effectively shoot out through the actual salon walls in the same way as their attackers would be able to shoot in. However, shooting through the slightly rotted wooden panelling of the secret door into the salon was no problem, and he could see where to shoot by using the spy hole in it. If he got the angle right he could get gut-shots to at least three before they knew what was happening or even knew where the shooting was coming from. But three wasn't enough because there were seven of them. Fine. He'd just wait for them to fan out through the suite and pick off whoever was left last in the salon, guarding the exit.

As he waited to make his move, he felt James hunker down behind him, trying to get as much cover as she could in the passageway. Sark turned his head toward her – his gaze cool blue and his brows arching gold - and nodded approvingly. It was unspoken between them that she should not surface until absolutely necessary.

The men started to fan out, four moved on but there were three remaining, showing no signs of leaving. Sark had hoped for better odds, but then … Sark got lucky. The men became too confident and began casually and carelessly swinging their weapons about at waist height, their sense of alertness and danger dulling. One of them came prowling near the secret door itself. Sark saw that he was an easy kill and was heavily armed with weapons which he could then appropriate, and so that's what he did.

He fired up through the door, catching the man at an angle under the jaw, with the bullet shrieking up through his head and out the other side. Death was instant. So was Sark's arrival into the salon, crashing through the door and slamming two bullets into a guard diagonally opposite him. The third man was so stunned that he didn't even manage to get his gun up before Sark had sent him flying backward with a bullet to the chest. Sark knew from the dynamics of the impact that the man was wearing Kevlar, and so clipped him in the head as he flew backward. The man died, but not before his finger jerked convulsively on the trigger of his gun, jammed there, and his twitching body traced an entire magazine of automatic firepower, one thousand rounds, at random into the room.

The place detonated in an explosion of red silk, shattered furniture and blasted plaster.

_Fucking shit!_

A string of profanities broke loose inside Sark's head as he dived backward into the passageway, crashing against James and yanking the body of the dead guard over them as added protection against the bullets which ripped and ricocheted about. He was aware of James behind him, frying pan dropped, curled up into a ball like a small hedgehog, hands over her ears, eyes scrunched shut, mouth wide open in a soundless scream. Sark knew that it wasn't the danger that had her stricken so much as the noise. Even with the automatic's silencer in play, in the confined space the percussive drum-role of bullets was deafening. For a civilian it would be a horrifying experience. Hell, for him it was pretty bad. He felt her body jolt and judder under him in an uncontrollable reaction to each and every round that whumped into the walls. He admired her for not actually screaming. His mind snapped back away from her as his list of internal profanities ended with a note to self.

_Think we just lost the element of surprise there Sarkey!_

Two of the remaining four men came running in through a far door, and Sark was instantly up on his feet. Using the dead man as body armour he levelled his Glock and shot one: straight to the head, the man's body spinning wildly away. The other man saw where Sark's shot had come from and levelled his weapon at waist height, firing madly. Sark shoved his Glock down the back of his sweats and wrestled with the corpse's automatic machine gun. From behind the cover of the dead man he pointed the weapon in the direction of the man in the far doorway and squeezed the trigger. The stunning spray of concentrated fire obliterated his opponent.

Time to get out of that passageway.

He tossed the corpse aside but kept the commandeered weapon and raced to the far doorway where the two others had come in. He pointed the muzzle of the gun round the door jamb and let rip. Dropping low he took a quick peek round it. Good. One more down. Time to leave.

Backing toward the exit he kept the machine gun trained on the inner door, loosing off short, randomly spaced bursts of suppressing fire. He jerked his head toward James, clearly seen still bunching up in the passageway, as though if she could just make herself that little bit smaller she'd somehow disappear completely.

"James!" he roared at her, "get out now!"

She didn't move, too petrified and possibly too deafened by the firepower to hear him.

Still moving backwards he gave off punching bullets at the far doorway just long enough to snatch the Glock from out the small of his back and slam a bullet into the wall above her head, to jerk her out of her frozen terror.

His voice roared louder than any gunfire. "I said – _fucking move!"_

Another one of his bullets shot over her head and got her running - jerking, stumbling, but running. She even had the presence of mind to pick up the dropped frying pan.

Knowing she was making for the exit, Sark pocketed the Glock down the back of his sweats again and got both hands on the machinegun, firing off further rounds at the potential source of danger as he skipped, still barefoot, back toward the door.

And then it all went pear-shaped.

From behind him he heard the heavy reverberating _thwang_ of metal against bone and had half turned to catch what was happening when he was slammed in the back by a rifle butt and was sent sprawling forward. The machine gun was ripped out of his hands and the Glock from his back as he fell. He was jerked back round to face – _the muzzle of a Sig Sauer resting between his eyes._

The man who held the gun failed to keep back a blink of surprise. "Mr. Sark?" There was a pause as the speaker collected himself. "Mr. Sark, what a surprise to see you,particularly as I'd hoped that you were already long dead. Who would ever have thought that you would have returned to Russia?" The man cocked his head slightly to one side, and grinned to himself. "You know, sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men do come out right?" He spoke English – it was strange, no-one ever thought Sark was Russian.

Sark took a few seconds before replying, so he could overcome the adrenalin pumping through his system and force his voice to remain perfectly neutral, in fact to sound even bored.

"Actually I was thinking something like that myself."

Sark took in the scene. Apart from the man holding a gun to his head, there was another one standing and a further one down on the floor. In his peripheral vision he could see that the fallen man's head had a bloody split where James had whacked him unconscious with the frying pan. Sark just knew that in her head James had already termed him 'Frying Pan Guy'.

Seeing Frying Pan Guy laid flat out on the floor Sark surprised himself by feeling a bizarre glow of pride – terrified and stunned as she might have been, James had still gotten back in the game. He saw that James herself was held upright and struggling by the second man. She kicked him and was stilled by a smack to the face so hard it left her half dazed. Sark's gaze flicked a message straight into the eyes of the man who'd slapped her: _I'm going to kill you for that_.

The man staggered backward and tightened his grip on James.

Sark felt the remaining man from the original seven come running up behind him and stop at an angle from him, slightly to the rear and off to the right. Sark had no doubt that under other circumstances the man would have been beating on him with a rifle butt or just plain shooting him, but it was as though he felt held in check – unsure of whether he could interfere with whatever his boss currently had planned. His boss was evidently the man holding Sark at gunpoint.

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Sark?"

Christ, Sark wondered, why did these minor league players always feel compelled to come over all James Bond Bad Guy and talk it to death? Did he remember him? Of course he fucking didn't! He left losers like this in his wake!

"Not really, I only bother with the First XI."

The man didn't get the joke. Sark didn't expect him to, he obviously couldn't have had the benefit of an English Public School education. He was probably some junior lieutenant from the now shattered K-Directorate who was trying to carve out some turf and make a name for himself.

"How did you know we were here?" Sark genuinely wanted to know.

The man laughed. "I didn't. That car you stole was one of mine. It was being used to courier drugs and had a significant consignment of coke in the trunk, so it was tagged."

Sark blinked. _Oh fucking great_. No wonder he'd thought it would be a good car for criminal endeavour – it was a car for criminal endeavour!

The man continued speaking. "We just followed the signal. We found the car but not the thief, so we went back over the path of the tracking to where we'd detected a stop in the journey and came here. So what can I say Mr. Sark, but - "

"Oh will you puhleeze just shut the fuck up?" James Dodgson's accented shriek cut the air. "What you can say is you were _lucky_ you ass-hat!" The man's gaze didn't leave Sark's but went blank for a second and his face slackened slightly, stunned at James' rant. Sark wondered, now where had he seen that pussy-lashed look on a tough guy's face before? Oh yes, on the faces of his entire crew back in Switzerland. Sark compressed a grin; half-dazed was evidently not nearly good enough to shut James Dodgson up. "So quit standing there making like you're actually any good at this show-down crap, fuck-nuts," she howled on, "and if you've got a freakin' game-plan, then get to it!"

The man with the gun looked at Sark, dumbstruck, but then made a swallowing recovery. "Charming. But she's hardly your type, eh Sark? A little lacking in style?"

_Don't tell me what my 'type' is arsehole_ –

Sark's thoughts were interrupted.

"Points for _style?"_ James screeched, outraged. "What d'ya think this is, _competition ballroom dancing?"_ James heaved against her captor. From the corner of his eye Sark saw that the man holding her was beginning to look almost panicked. Sark grinned openly. Diverted by James' verbal attack the men about him were losing their lock on the situation, they were taking their attention off him. James was back in the game alright. "Sark?" she continued, rasping out her words, struggling in her captor's grasp, "just in case there's any doubt whatsoever in your mind on this issue, I totally give you permission to whack these fuckers!"

So Sark did.

In the next instance of condensed action the dichotomy between his blatant youth and his controlled demeanour stunned even her.

He fought with short, intense movements, no effort wasted, nothing telegraphed in advance or unnecessarily extended. He used blunt, compressed, immensely powerful and rapid moves designed to snap limbs and break joints with the maximum speed. His was an economic brutality.

His left hand had whipped up in an arc, knocking the gun away from his face and gripping the man's wrist in the same action, and then he twisted. There was a horrible grinding and clicking noise as all three joints in the man's arm – wrist, elbow and shoulder - were instantly locked against each other and dislocated. His opponent didn't even have time to squeeze off a round before his limp, agonised arm dropped the gun. Sark flexed down and coolly caught the falling weapon in mid air with his free right hand and then swivelled up in the same movement to slam two bullets into the head of the man standing next to him. He tossed aside the man he was holding and strode down on James' captor, stopping three feet away from him with Sark's outstretched arm covering the rest of the distance, levelling the gun straight into the other man's face.

Less than three seconds had passed since Sark had made his first move.

Doctor James Dodgson, and the man who held her, were each as stunned as the other.

Sark's face was a blank mask as he unblinkingly stared over James' head into the eyes of the man holding her. James hardly dared look a him – he was an utterly terrifying sight to behold - she was white faced, and her hammering heart was practically jumping up into her throat. She was held by the man behind her and, for the moment, being rescued by the man in front of her, but the man in front if her was by far and away the more petrifying of the two. She could barely swallow. Sark at full-throttle was both horrifying and magnificent in equal measure.

The man holding her reacted: he physically jerked James up off the ground and held her in front of him, her face obscuring his head. She was body armour. Sark gave a flicker of annoyance, he couldn't shoot the bastard now or he'd give James powder burns, concussion or worse. James knew it too and from the advantage of her suddenly increased height she recovered herself and shoved a hand behind her back, caught her captor's crotch, and with a grimace of rage twisted his balls. The man screamed and dropped her immediately so that she crashed to the floor. Realising his mistake he looked up, terrified, at Sark.

"Told you I'd kill you," announced Sark lightly in his native Russian as he shot him.

He turned to see the man who'd earlier held a gun to his head agonisingly trying to reach for another weapon. Sark took two strides back to him and swivelled, smashing the heel of his bare foot down hard, backward, into the prone man's ribs. The ribs crunched.

Behind him he heard James give a hiss of involuntary sympathy for the floored man. Sark reflected that unlike him she had a fully functioning conscience, and now that the remainder of their enemies were reduced to helplessness, it was beginning to re-assert itself. He was relieved when the man spoke in Russian. Sark knew James wouldn't understand a word if he started begging.

"I didn't know you did partnerships Sark." The man hissed in pain and anger, jerking his head to indicate James.

Anger 'eh? Well, at least here was someone who understood that there came a moment when a transgression had gone so far that there was no point in grovelling, because forgiveness was never on the cards. Now that the point had come for him, he wasn't going to beg. A small part of Sark almost respected him for it. A small part. And only almost.

"I don't ordinarily." Sark answered smoothly in his native tongue, utterly unintelligible to James. "But the WWF have introduced a new speciality – Tag Team Sarcasm - so I buddied up with the best."

He shot the man point blank in the face.

He felt rather than heard James' body give a shocked, spontaneous jerk of sympathy when the bullet smashed home. He looked over his shoulder at her, she was still on the floor, gamely trying to get up but physically too shaky to do it. She'd been through a lot and she was flooded with adrenalin, and now that the immediate danger was passed and the adrenalin had no-where to go, the body's typical reaction took over: she began to shake uncontrollably. Sark let her. It was a perfectly average human reaction, nothing to be startled at or ashamed of, it was one he didn't get only because he'd been trained out of it. He never stopped to wonder if he didn't get it because he'd never been a perfectly average human being to begin with.

He weighed up the situation. She wouldn't be able to collect herself for a couple of minutes. Time enough to get outside, deal with anyone there and then get back before she could recover, before she could usefully grab a weapon and plan to escape from him.

Sark ripped a jacket, a baseball cap and a fully loaded machine gun off the nearest body and clawed his way into the clothes as he leapt down the back stairs – four at a time - to the outside. He ignored his barefoot state, he hadn't had the time to grab a pair of shoes that fitted.

He saw the van straight away, regulation black, no windows – _must get myself something different next time _– with seemingly one man inside, the driver. The silenced weapons and the thick walls of the old palace had muffled any noise of the fire fight. The man was sitting there, actually listening to the radio. Anyone inside the back of the van? Sark didn't think so, but better safe than sorry; he'd had enough of being unexpectedly caught out for one night.

He disregarded the freezing cold cobbles beneath his feet. The chill was such that it would have felt like pain, if he had allowed himself to feel it. He congratulated himself that he was good at not feeling pain, he congratulated himself that he was good at not feeling most things.

He flicked open the back doors and slammed bullets along the van and into the front cabin. The back was empty, but anyone there would have died instantly in the traversing gunfire, the driver died instantly on the receiving end.

Sark merely hoped he hadn't damaged the engine block too much, he'd already half formulated a plan, and if he decided to go with it then he'd need the van later.

He didn't give a thought to the people he'd killed.

Irina had asked him once if killing concerned him.

'_Not half as much as dying does.'_

He raced back upstairs and found James just where he'd left her.

She'd recovered enough to stop shaking and instead she sat in a slumped, boneless heap on the floor, her back to a wall, breathing shallowly through her open mouth, blowing out gentle breaths to calm herself.

She looked across and saw Sark in the doorway. He looked like a controlled athlete who had just won a match.

She had sat dazed as he had dealt with the van. She still didn't know what had been more alarming, the men who had attacked them or Sark himself. His concise brutality and sheer speed had been terrifying and stunning. She had known she ought to have tried to escape in his absence - logic demanded it - but logic had been a small voice shouting to itself in a far off room in a distant part of her head, and dazed she wasn't even sure if the message was for her anyway.

She had wanted to be sick in Sark's absence, but some sense of pride hadn't let her.

She had no idea what she looked like, but she knew it must have been bad because she saw Sark stop and blink when he saw her, before he carried on into the room.

She was learning that a blink from Sark was a volume from anyone else.

He paused in the middle of the room, looking down at the floor slightly before speaking. "If it helps," he said, indicating the bodies about them, "they were all very bad men. I've no doubt whatsoever they would have killed me, and then very probably have raped you."

"Raped _me?"_ Her voice juddered and stuttered. "You're the pretty one – they'd a killed me and raped you."

Despite that she sounded like a person in shock, Sark's mind calmed. When he'd come back into the room just then and had seen her slumped, open mouthed, closed eyed and ashen faced against the wall, just for a second he had thought something terrible had happened in his absence and that she was dead.

He got his sick, lurching heartbeat back under control.

Some part of his mind shoved the unwanted thought - that she might have to die anyway at the end of all this – into the dark of a mental cupboard.

James had already forgotten about the shooting and the shouting. Unknowingly she had filed the whole thing away in a wallet in her subconscious, labelled: Sark Saved My Life.

A few minutes later her mind had stilled; she had been so shocked by the trauma of the preceding action that all immediate fear had been burned out of her. She wasn't brave, she didn't think, rather she'd simply been driven beyond fear and into someplace else. Her face hurt from where she'd been slapped.

With shoes now on his feet, Sark was moving round the salon, looking up and about at the ruinous damage. The place was an utter mess, but for some reason he found he felt loathe to leave it, for some reason it felt like home. He'd come back to it, he'd fought to hold it, he'd won it, and now he wasn't willing to let it go.

"Suppose we could still stay here," he said, "I suppose it could still do."

She watched him flick at some chipped plaster with his bare foot as he looked unhappily at the mess around him. It really did seem that he was genuinely uncertain about quite what to do next. She sensed something: that almost certainly he went through life leaving a trail of destruction and carnage in his wake, but that he hadn't had much actual experience of being forced to stick around and clean up. He wasn't a man who had to deal with consequences.

"Yeah, sure it could still do," she gasped out shakily, "if it weren't for the dead bodies, sprayed blood and bullet holes."

Sark flicked an exasperated glance at her. Hell, it wasn't his fault that the remnants of K-Directorate had decided to pop round and butch-up! He looked about him. He had to admit it though, the place was a mess. A fine haze of blood and brain matter began to settle on the floor in the corner where he'd given a bullet lobotomy to one of the guards. The smell of blood, death and cordite was beginning to stink the place out.

James crawled on all fours from her position by the wall and shakily sat down on the shattered, wonky-legged remains of what had, until minutes ago, been a perfectly serviceable Louis Quinze chair. She looked around her, trying to take in the mayhem.

If she hadn't seen it herself she wouldn't have believed it. A palatial room reduced from orderly opulence and royal grandeur to a shot up, dust laden, blood spattered hell-hole that wouldn't have gone out of place in a civil war battle-zone - and all done quicker than she could dial out for pizza. And had it taken a squad of storm-troopers, a battalion of tanks and a ton of munitions to do it? No, effectively it had taken just two minutes of Mr. Sark.

She was amazed. Sitting, she raised her arms and watched the plaster dust and motes of ruptured silk that floated in the air settle on her sleeves, like children do with snowflakes. She was still slightly stunned by it all. She heard her voice almost as though someone else was speaking, saying lightly, "Well, guess it's gonna take more than a bottle of kitchen cleanser to clear this mess up."

She was right. Sark knew he was going to have to stop pissing about and take over what was left of K-Directorate if only just to get the place cleaned up and get his hands on a new crew. Besides, he had to impose his authority on the city, he had to engender fear. If 'they' weren't afraid of him 'they' would kill him. Well, there was no time like tonight. Wherever the main nest was, the last thing they'd be expecting was an immediate counter attack. Particularly as they hadn't even known who they were messing with. As far as they were concerned they'd just set out to use overwhelming force against the hapless thief of an opportunistically stolen car. He made up his mind. So then, it was to be an immediate mission. For that he'd need a Handler running recon and surveillance. He looked down at James.

Her messy hair was thick with dust and grime. She sat completely oblivious to him, still letting the motes in the air fall on her like snowflakes, holding her hands up to her face as she appraised the plaster film beginning to coat them. He saw her take a cautious, experimental lick of one finger, evidently just to see what centuries old plaster tasted like. From her expression, the verdict was 'sour'.

Okay, thought Sark, time to administer an intellectual slap. He spoke firmly.

"Doctor. My birthday is Christmas Day 1983. If converted to British standard date numerics, what is my birthday divided by pi to the first four digits, with the result rounded up to the nearest integer?"

He'd simply trundled the words out, with no idea what the answer would be.

She cut a glance sideways in annoyance at his curt tone, she felt as though she were back at school, nevertheless she pursed her lips slightly, working it out and then mentally snapped to and got back on the clock. "Forty seven."

Sark smiled, indulgent with her and pleased with himself. He had no idea if the answer were correct, and it didn't matter if it wasn't, what mattered was that she'd gotten up to speed and worked it out. To engage the enemy effectively tonight he'd needed to rustle up a logical Handler from out of nowhere, and he'd just got one.

James' face screwed up slightly, perplexed, as though she were still mooting something that was taking a little longer to work out than the sum had. She gasped. She turned to him. "_Christmas?_" she shrieked accusingly. _"_You bastard! - I _knew_ you were a goddamn Capricorn!"

Sark smirked: a knowing, slithering smile. Yep, she'd do alright.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17: Botta De Tempo** - _countering or attacking when the opponent is distracted and/or unprepared. _

Within minutes Sark regretted having told James his birthday. Christ, he wondered to himself, of all the problems he could have issued her, why had his split second decision been to pose one that gave her his birth date? Whatever aim he'd had, it had backfired, as once she had gotten over her derision at his 'star sign' she had twigged to just how young he really was. Aghast and astounded she had squealed, _but you're just a kid! I knew you were young, but I didn't think you were that young! _

It reminded him of just why it didn't pay to trade in personal details.

To say that Sark dealt harshly with those who denigrated his youth and thus who tried to undercut his authority was an understatement. He'd callously shot people dead for it before now, and had shot Schreiber in Switzerland partly to shut James up about it. Now he surprised himself by being angry not primarily at her but fundamentally at himself – _why had he bloody well told her?_

Did he _want_ her knowing things about him?

"Doctor, I am a 'kid' who has run international crime syndicates, is feared across five continents," – _dammit, she is not going to regard me as a boy _– "who has personally assassinated three Third World Dictators - "

" - not that your bragging or anything."

" – and who," he lied, pushing his ranking up, "is _nineteenth_ on the CIA's Most Wanted list, so let's just drop the 'boy' thing shall we?" He glared at her, intent on a crushing firmness. "Now – here's what we're going to do for the rest of the night."

Ten minutes later James sat, numb, looking up at him. Sark finished his exposition, looking down at her like a composed schoolmaster, confident that she had absorbed the lesson. She may have been sitting there with what he had come to think of as that 'gum chewing' expression on her face but he knew perfectly well her eidetic memory had captured and stored every last detail and that her mind had understood it. Mentally she was too much like him not to have.

"Any comments?" he clipped out.

"Yeah – birthday and Christmas on the same day huh? Pretty good. If I'm still stuck here come December I only have to buy you the one present."

Sark blinked and curved a smile, speaking with a tensile nuance. "I can see perfectly well that you're trying to annoy me, you know."

"Yeah – but I'm getting pretty good at it though, aren't I?"

He slid her a look of almost silky annoyance. "Do you have any questions about _the_ _matter in hand_?"

"Well I don't know. Does '_bite me_' count as a question?"

Sark decided enough was enough and stared her down, his unyielding gaze ending their little fencing-match. James closed her eyes, sighed with defeat and then spoke.

"Okay, to summarise: you expect me to accompany you on, effectively, a two-man assault upon an entrenched position held by numerous troops who are all heavily armed. And the aim of this mission is not even to kill large numbers of said troops – which by the way we could do just by blowin' the shit out of their place – but by going in there, decapitating the hierarchy and installing ourselves – well, installing you – as its new CnC? And in all that you're going to do the gunslinging thing while I ride electronic shotgun?" Sark had called her role, 'handling'. She looked at him in disbelief. "What do you think I am Sark, _good at this shit?"_

Sark compressed a smile. Actually, yes, he did think James Dodgson was _good at this shit_. As far as Sark was concerned, over the short time he had dealt with her, he had come to recognise James as a Drop In. A 'Drop In' to Sark was nothing remotely social, it was nothing to do with 'popping round for tea'. Instead it was a term he'd coined for himself to describe very rare people, those who when yanked out of civilian life and just 'dropped into' the game, not only survived the initial impact but got up to speed and started playing. Sometimes they even won.

James Dodgson was one of them, whether she knew it or not. The thought flickered through his mind that Sydney Bristow would have been one too if she'd not had any training. He mentally slapped himself. _Oh for fuck's sake Sarkey, will you stop thinking about that stuck up CIA Princess?_

He viewed James warily. On the very few occasions he had ever encountered Drop Ins, Sark had always been caught between admiration and alarm. Such people were unsettling, they had the gifts to call a winning play, but they hadn't had any training. Lack of training gave them a potential advantage in terms of left-field thinking but it equally left them prone to simple errors; it made them random.

_And I'm Mr. Sark and I don't like random._

Before responding to James' challenge about his plans for the night he weighed up his options. In an attempt to gain her support he could either recap all he had previously stated, or he could just do it the quick way. He chose the quick way.

"James," he looked up at the ceiling and slid his hands into his pockets, "just _shut up."_

Sark took as many weapons as he could carry from their annihilated foe and got the black van started. The engine was jumping from the damage inflicted earlier but it would get them to where they needed to go. Sark knew where they were headed because he'd resuscitated the merely unconscious Frying Pan Guy and, speaking Russian, had given him the choice of an imminent and agonising death or of aiding Sark and then actually going on to benefit from his co-operation.

No brainer.

Frying Pan Guy was in the back of the van, alive, hog-tied, and quietly terrified. He'd told Sark everything he needed to know: who they were up against - Dmitri Skolvikov, mid-ranking ex-K-Directorate, now running his own criminal enterprise - and where to find him. Frying Pan Guy had become aware that he was dealing with none other than Mr. Sark. Sark's reputation alone tended to terrify, but having personally recognised that Sark had destroyed six of his enemies inside two minutes had added considerably to the effect for Frying Pan Guy.

The van bowled along, headed towards the east of the city. Turning up in the van made sense, Skolvikov wouldn't be alarmed by its approach, in fact his crew were expecting to see it. Sark and James sat up front. Sark drove.

A tense and frightened James slammed insults at an intent and focussed Sark. The part of Sark's mind that wasn't drilling down into the issue of what lay ahead, that wasn't probing for weaknesses, closing down on options and setting up for contingencies, slammed insults straight back because he knew that sarcasm was James' way of venting anxiety.

"Ass-whack," she spat.

'Irritant."

"Suit-boy."

"Annoyance."

"Lame-brain."

There was a pause, then Sark murmured slyly, "Swamp-dweller."

_Swamp-dweller?_ James flashed about for a killer come-back and then got one. She looked at him sideways, "… _Rambaldi-whore_."

The van swerved slightly on the road before an irked Sark righted it, continuing to drive on. James' face split into a shivering grin. Okay, so she might be tense and frightened, completely unwilling to go on this crazy mission and convinced she was riding to her certain death, but hey, she'd just landed one on Mr. Sark!

She looked across at him. He was concentrating on the road again, the only sign of annoyance being that his gaze was even more intent than usual; that, and his teeth were snagging at his faintly crooked lower lip. She had realised somewhere along the way that he did that snagging thing when he was puzzled or annoyed – he did it whenever he was distracted. He was doing it now. Yep, she'd landed one on him alright. Well, what did you know, even in an extreme such as this, life still held some small pleasures!

Minutes later they swung off onto a side-road.

James made a last attempt at getting the whole thing called off. "Look," she was scared at what they were about to do, teeth chattering, she felt freezing cold even in the warm van, "this is a real long-shot. Even if you can take out the top guy, why're the rest just gonna fall into line behind you?"

"Because I'm Mr. Sark."

James gave a blurt of jagged laughter at what she saw as a ridiculous statement. Sark flicked her an irritated glance and concentrated on the road again.

"I should explain," he said. "You need to understand that with their top echelon gone they'll desperately need a credible leader. Without leadership they'll be wide open for a take over by another faction. They'll know that if they don't line up behind someone with a fearsome reputation this very night - me - then they'll all be dead by the next one."

James considered it, registering his targeted gaze and fierce determination. They wanted someone with a fearsome reputation? – well he was the guy for the job alright.

"Well then, look's like you got the gig."

A few minutes later they turned a tight corner and the swerve jolted James into Sark. She glanced up as she righted herself, pushing off him and catching his profile against a passing street light.

Lean elegant jaw. Shock of dark blond hair. Wide cheekbones. Intent blue gaze … perfectly carved profile. Within a jumble of confused thoughts, one of which was unsettlingly to do with 'cradle snatching', she was suddenly hit by the unavoidable recognition that Sark was personally beautiful.

Staring at him, suddenly caught up in him, almost unable to look away, she was slammed by his poised perfection. She saw that his was a precise, crystalline beauty, a glittering beauty, but she shivered because it was the glitter of frost. She recalled the incident in the kitchen earlier where he had made her take his finger into her mouth, how glintingly determined he had been when she had resisted. And then he had come at her with an almost blank-eyed intensity. She jerked her gaze out of the passenger window. Alarmed, she recalled what had really scared her about that incident: not just his sudden attack when he'd gripped her face and moved in on her, not just the startling realisation of just how much more physically capable he was than she, but the almost sick urge she had felt then to just _give in_ to him. A horrible liquid urge to just submit and surrender. The sense that if she would just do that then he would wrap her up and carry her somewhere safe.

She could have slapped herself for thinking it. Because that was all wrong, wasn't it? Because he wasn't going to do that, was he? - because he was her goddamn _kidnapper!_

Sitting in the van with the man who was holding her captive, she was hit by a sudden claustrophobic urge to get away from him. He was so near as he drove along, that not only did he have freckles, but at this range she could _count_ them. She fastened on the image of him as a creature of the cold: elegant, pristine but someone who would burn you if you touched him, even if he didn't mean to. She used that image to steel herself against him, against that sense that if she would just _let go_ then he would catch her. She forced her voice to sound even and unconcerned as she made a key request. "Do I get a gun to use in all this?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd shoot me with it."

James swallowed hard, trying to sound as innocent as she could manage. "Oh, c'mon, now why would I do that?"

"Because I'm a devious bastard from Hell whom even Satan's disowned."

She slumped slightly. "Well, guess you can't argue with that."

Sark swerved the van over sharply, braked and turned on her. James gasped and almost flattened herself against the passenger-side door, a spike of adrenalin driving through her, terrified that she was about to be hit. He raised both eyebrows in genuine puzzlement and rustled in a pocket and offered her something from it: "Biscuit?" It was a crumpled packet of shortbread he'd presumably gotten from the kitchen. "We've stopped so I can keep an eye on their H.Q entrance," he explained, jerking his head to indicate a far street corner although he didn't take his gaze off her. Perplexed, he watched as she seemed to slump slightly in front of him as though in some great physical relief. Still puzzled, he internally shrugged and decided to slip back into seduction mode: he extracted a finger of shortbread. He looked down at it and then very pointedly looked up at her mouth. With a sly, slow, smirk he nudged it gently and slowly into her mouth: this time, unlike his previous finger, it hit the resisting portcullis of her closed teeth. He looked at her, teasingly, but not giving in. "Well, you'll need _something_ to eat," he purred. She shook her head. He paused, realising he was getting no-where, and then remembered the kitchen, that all-engulfing pull he had felt toward her, that subsumation of self as she'd deliciously tugged on him - he didn't want that overwhelming sensation back. He shrugged, affecting a casual grin, and popped the biscuit into his own mouth. "Suit yourself."

James felt almost sick with relief, her heartbeat thumping in her chest. Remembering how mere seconds ago she had become poundingly aware of his beauty only added to her confusion.

Ten minutes later Sark had munched mindlessly through the packet, automatically shuffling shortbread to and from his mouth, his gaze fixed relentlessly on the far street corner. James felt faintly ashamed at her suspicion that Sark had been intent on hitting her, obviously hitting her was the last thing on his mind; hell, now he wasn't even hitting _on_ her.

Cutting a sideways look at him she took in his blond hair, intense blue eyes, almost Slavic bone-structure and was struck by a sudden recognition – Sark wasn't British goddammit, he was Russian! Once again she felt an unsettling jolt, this time at an awareness of just how many layers there were to him, of how often he confounded expectation. She was struck by a sense of there being shifting, hidden aspects to him, hidden almost from himself. Something chimed within her that had rung before. An intimation of an old soul bent upon inhabiting a young body, or of a young soul peering out behind the face of someone older – someone who had lived too much life.

"What are we watching for?" she asked.

"_We_ aren't watching for anything, _I_ am."

_Geez, put me in my place why don't you?_ She looked across at him as he bit down on a last piece of shortbread, his gaze still targeted across the street. "Do you realise you've eaten the whole packet?"

Sark looked down at his crumb-covered jacket and at the last piece of half-chewed shortbread in his hand. "Well I did offer you one." He spoke through a mouth full of biscuit. "You said you didn't want it."

"But you ate the _lot_."

He looked across at her. "Well I can't just have _one_, once I've had one I want them all." His gaze returned to its point of focus down the street.

James surveyed his still, watching profile. _I can't just have one, once I've had one I want them all_. His leitmotif, if he but knew it: all or nothing.

"Oh c'mon, what _are_ we watching and waiting for?"

"I'm tallying activity, who goes in, who goes out. I'm waiting for a lull," he straightened up in his seat, casually brushing crumbs off him as he kept his eyes on the far corner, "and I think I've just got one."

Less than a minute later he drove under an archway into a quiet inner courtyard. Before them, across an ill-lit cobbled square, was an inconspicuous steel door set flush into an old, faintly mouldering brick wall. The entrance to the K-Directorate offshoot's H.Q.

"Look, can't I stay outside while you go in? We both know there's enough electronic equipment in the back of this van for me to cover you from here."

"Of course there is, but you won't use it will you?" Sark's blue gaze lazered straight to the back of her brain, "because you'll be too busy running for it." James set her jaw, caught between annoyance at being uncovered and guilt at the same. "Don't try to hide anything from me James, you're not practiced enough at it." He turned, opened driver-side door and hopped out of the van. "We've already gone over this, we're having no further discussion on it. Now get out."

Dressed in combat jackets and caps which they'd ripped off their slain enemies, the two looked inconspicuous in the poorly lit yard. Sark untied Frying Pan Guy and got him out the back and re-iterated his earlier offer: work with me and benefit, or betray me and die. Frying Pan Guy nodded his acquiescence.

They moved to the door, Frying Pan Guy up first with Sark pushing the muzzle of his now fully-loaded Glock against the Russian's spine. All thoughts of what had happened in the kitchen with James, of any confusion he might have felt, had been banished: he was totally back on the clock. Frying Pan Guy gave the code at the door and was let in – Sark announced his entrance with a silenced spitting of bullets, two each to the men guarding the corridor. He shoved Frying Pan Guy against a wall, the two men locking gazes. Frying Pan Guy was much bigger than Sark, but he was still terrified. Sark knew it was time to drill Frying Pan Guy's loyalties into his head one more time.

Sark raised his eyebrows in a friendly acknowledgement so incongruous it was alarming – Sark intended it to be - and then he spoke in Russian. "I intend to kill Skolvikov and take over this organisation tonight. Skolvikov isn't doing too well against the other factions, is he? Well I will. Back me and you'll be moving up in the world; try to move against me and you'll die." He added a last casual rider, "Oh, and by the way, I pay my employees in American Dollars."

The other man's eyes flared with sudden certainty. _American Dollars?_ – why hadn't Sark just said that at the start! He nodded, Frying Pan Guy had picked his team.

They hid the corpses in a side room.

No sudden flurry of alarm met their entrance. As yet, none but they knew they had arrived. Sark looked over at James: how was she taking it? She looked tense, she was shaking, but her eyes – her eyes were calm.

With the help of intel gleaned from FPG they reached the surveillance room without difficulty. Although they would show up clearly on the internal closed-cap security cameras, it didn't matter. They were just three soldiers moving about as normal, besides, it was 2.30 a.m. and everyone was tired. FPG showed just whose side he was on by accepting a silenced weapon from Sark and machine-gunning dead the drowsy crew of the surveillance room.

Sark installed James at the controls. She already knew how to use them. Using the equipment in the back of the van he had let her practice. He had given her five minutes to assimilate a day's worth of information – no problem. He fitted a comm head set on her and one on himself. He dialled his in to the frequency the K-Directorate crew already used, and then created a fresh one for he and James. She and he could talk to each other and, via the surveillance she controlled, he could hear anything anyone else said over radio frequency and even address them in turn if he had to.

"Where's Skolvikov?" he demanded of FPG. The man searched the bank of screens before him and pointed to one. It showed a small group of men in a room, standing and talking, with a further one sitting behind a desk and four others playing cards at a table. Skolvikov was the man behind the desk. Sark could see the location of the room from the monitors in front of him. The layout of the building as given by FPG was fixed inside both his and James' heads.

Other screens showed men scattered around the building, some active, some drowsy, most sleeping.

He knew exactly where to go to get Skolvikov and how to get there, so he went. Before he departed he shot-up the PC in the room and confiscated the corpses' mobiles.

"Sorry James, but if you were thinking of calling long-distance, then change your mind. You are not getting away from me."

She shot a sideways look at him, voice shaking at all the violence around her but lip curled. "What a charmer you are, huh? The James Bond of Bad-asses, Agent 666 Licensed by Satan."

Sark split a slow curling grin, amused at what she'd said, admiring the sheer guts it took for her to say it. Looking her over, he exuded confident control and slowly put his fingers to his lips and blew her a kiss. He saw her flinch away from it, yet at the same time blush. He bit his lip, grinning. That was it, he'd decided: after he'd cracked down on Skolvikov he was definitely returning to very personally and very thoroughly 'collect' James. First things first though …

As he departed, locking James in behind him, the only thing left of him in the room was the echo of that confident, smirking grin; like the Cheshire Cat's, it seemed to hang in the air.

Nervous, James ground her teeth and then started mimicking his accent to relieve her tension. "_Sorry James, but if you were thinking of calling long-distance, then change your mind. You are not getting away from me._ Guh!" She mimicked him again, "_I'm Mr Smartypants and I have a fancy accent._"

She sat alone, the only creature left alive in the room, seething with frustration and shivering with fear. She got the urge to snark her anxieties away, but who at, dead guys? She cast a glance at the corpses and forcibly suppressed a keen memory of several zombie movies. Part of her mind thought it was odd that her situation amidst the recently dead didn't bother her as much as it should have. Another part of her didn't think it was odd at all, she'd seen so much danger and killing since Sark had snatched her out of normality, that every fresh enormity somehow carried less impact than the preceding. 

She just had to face it, she wished she wasn't there, but she was and that was that. She'd just have to get on with it. Sark's voice broke across radio silence, calling to her by the code-name he had chosen for her.

"All okay, _Guttersnipe_?"

She switched into Sark's solo frequency and took a deep breath before she spoke. When she did her voice was only slightly shaky. In devising his own codename he had rejected her vampire themed suggestion of 'Sarkula' and she resentfully called him by the name he had chosen for himself.

"Loud and clear, 'Prime Minister'."

Smirking at her grudging acknowledgement of him, Sark knew that the take-down was never going to be easy, but it was do-able, and given his limited options it was necessary. It risked himself, James, and thus ultimately Irina – in some ways a woman he thought of almost as a mother - but to do nothing would be fatal. When he heard James' voice in his ear at least he was sure of one thing, James was on his side; well, for now. She had to be, he hadn't given her any choice.

He had already told her that it was part of her role to give him information without him asking, so he could make the minimum noise. She provided a running update. "No change of status, everybody still nice and quiet." And then he heard a tense gasp in his ear. "Uh oh. Company's coming down the next corridor. One guy."

Sark's reaction was to drop back behind FPG so they were moving in single file. FPG nodded casually to the oncoming man as they passed, who then paid no undue attention to Sark. Easy. James saw it all on the internal video surveillance. Sark heard her breathless response in his ear.

"Whoah … cool," she commended despite herself.

Sark cracked open a fresh can of self-congratulation: if he didn't get her to like him, he'd at least get her to admire him!

He and his aide glided up and along through the levels of the building, forewarned by James and meeting no serious challenge. It was going better that Sark had expected, until it suddenly wasn't.

"Shit!"

Sark kept moving but stiffened slightly at James' note of panic in his ear.

"Sark, there's someone outside knocking to get in!"

Damn. "How many?" Despite the increased tension, Sark sounded as though he might be enquiring after how many lumps of sugar she took in her tea.

"How many men? A lot. Er … three, no … four! Sark, I can't get the door open, there's no electronic control, they're gonna know something's wrong when they can't get in!"

_Oh bollocks!_ Sark felt the English schoolboy's swear-word detonate in his head. He kept moving forward, giving no hint of his inner frustration to the man accompanying him. First rule of leadership: always look like you're in control, especially when you're not. He ran a contingency analysis: fine, he'd got one. It was a bit desperate, but it might actually turn out for the best.

"Any notable movement inside the building?"

"No, everyone still looks normal."

FPG and Sark were continuing to move up and along towards Skolvikov. They'd passed several men coming the other way and pulled the same trick each time, radiating the blasé attitude that they were supposed to be there. Everyone bought it. They were on the same corridor as Skolvikov now, there'd only effectively be the men in the room with him to guard him. Everyone else was more or less behind Sark. Okay, time to go to Plan B.

"Sark, those guys are getting tense! They've got cell-phones out and -"

"Fine. Buckle up."

He went to Plan B. Sark picked a remote detonator out of his pocket, pressed a button and blew up the van outside. The explosion put the four men at the door out of action – in two cases forever – and immediately sent every guy in the building into a panic stricken Code Red. The K-Directorate channel which Sark had been monitoring leapt to life in a jumble of chaos, confusion and countermanded orders.

Just the way he liked it, when it involved his enemies and not himself.

Floors below him, James' eyes were riveted to the screen showing the room with Skolvikov in. She was half out of her seat. _Everybody in that room was on their feet with a fucking weapon! What the hell was Sark going to do? It was suicide!_ _He was going to be killed!_

She made her play.

The whole place was wired for entry alarms. James tripped the one outside the window of Skolvikov's room and every man in it jerked toward the noise, they had their backs to Sark as he flung two stun grenades ahead of him into the room. James was intent on watching Sark. She wasn't watching the screen showing the corridor outside her room and so she didn't see two men running up it. She didn't even have time to gasp when she was hurled out of her chair by a man who'd kicked the door down and was shoving a gun in her face.

Upstairs Sark had Skolvikov covered point-blank whilst FPG covered the rest of the stunned men in the room. Skolvikov shook his head to clear his vision and heard the news from the men he'd sent to surveillance: they had a hostage. Sark heard it too on his own headset. Skolvikov grinned, issuing out an order for them to bring up whoever they had.

Stalemate.

Everyone in the room radiated tension, apart from the one man in it who had the most reason to: Sark. Not that he didn't feel it, it was just that Sark had learned not to show it.

Mr. Sark didn't do jittery.

An unblinking Sark had a gun to Skolvikov's head. Sark could hear the scatter of words in the room about him and over his headset, among them his own name and a scrambled, jabbered description of him from those many who knew of him to those few who didn't. One description referred to him as '_a White Devil'_. Unbeknown to the Russians but known to Sark, _'The White Devil'_ was the title of a Webster Jacobean Tragedy. Sark had always been rather partial to Webster. He always had liked a good Revenge Tragedy.

Sark didn't pull the trigger on Skolvikov. He didn't know what shape James was in, and the best hostage he had in protecting James against Skolvikov was Skolvikov himself. Besides, if he shot Skolvikov one of Skolvikov's men might shoot him and that would leave James with no-one. James didn't even speak Russian and Sark knew that if he died then the men around her would just regard her as a loose end, one most easily tidied up by killing her.

Even though Sark and Skolvikov were at a stand-off, none of the other men in the room tried to shoot Sark. They could have easily, they couldn't all be held off by an increasingly nervous FPG, but something else was staying them. They all knew that this was Sark, the White Devil, a Legend of Mayhem … If Sark had wanted them all dead he would have just blown the building up; no, Sark was here for something, and it might not be to their disadvantage. Things hadn't been going too well for them recently. They'd gotten burned on deals and other factions were zeroing in on them, scenting weakness. Maybe it was time for a new direction, or a new director?

There wasn't just tension in the air, there was anticipation too.

The two men who'd stormed the surveillance room flung James through the door. She landed on her ass but immediately flipped the finger to one of the men who was still pointing a gun at her. "Fuck you, I'm all threated out already, okay?" She jerked her head towards Sark, explaining to the men, "you don't scare me, I've just spent five days with him!"

James had reached that state she was getting used to around Sark, being too angry to be scared, or maybe just being too scared not to be angry.

There was a slight ripple of laughter in the room at her words. A lot of the men didn't understand what she had said - they didn't speak English - but they all got the attitude.

Sark's eyes glittered ice-chip blue. James was in the room and she was alive and still in the game. Fine. He enjoyed the slight haze of uncertainty in Skolvikov's eyes – Skolvikov knew his own men were laughing and he wasn't entirely sure that somehow it wasn't at him. Sark grinned openly at the man, projecting utter confidence. _Even if the game hasn't actually turned in my favour, I'm going to get that bastard thinking it has._ Besides, you never knew, whatever else James was, she was getting to be lucky for him.

One of the men in the room looked at James, pointed at her and then pointed at Sark.

"Sark?" he said, the implied question cutting clear across the language barrier – _are you with him?_

She nodded. "Sure am, alright. You know, 'Mr. Sark, rhymes with Shark'? "

The few men whose English was good enough laughed at the joke, but the mood was catching and even those who didn't understand laughed. Any trigger happy setting among them went down a notch.

Sark's eyes had gone from ice-chips to sapphires. He was loving it. _Oh James, you are a brilliant darling …_

Skolvikov spoke in English to Sark. "Mr. Sark? How very strange to see you here, I didn't realise you were in Moscow, let alone alive. After all this time I - "

James rolled her eyes, "Oh can we just fast-forward through this shit already? I've been here once before tonight."

Surprisingly for a scientist, in a high pressure situation James wasn't the kind of person who formulated a game-plan; Sark had game-plans, James had … hunches, impulse, a vague impression of what to do and of which way to go. In extreme circumstances, whatever her gut feeling told her, she went with it – she never second guessed. In an aggressive environment she instinctively functioned in the mind-set which Government Military the world over spent millions attempting to drum into elite combat troops: when in a tight spot, make a call, any call, because any call is better than no call, because 'no call' means you've frozen.

James looked about her and made her call.

"Any one of you guys speak English?" A man nodded. "Well translate this Bi-Lingual Guy. 'Yes it's Sark', 'no he's not dead', 'yes he just wiped out an entire crew that idiot sent to get him'," she jerked a thumb at Skolvikov, "and 'yes he's here to whack out Skolvikov'. After that he'll be the head of your organisation and you'll working for him, the biggest, nastiest Bad-Ass in Moscow."

Bi-lingual Guy had been muttering a running translation for those who didn't speak English. At that last, everyone looked from Sark to Skolvikov and back again. The man pointing the gun at James had lowered it.

James seized the moment.

"Needless to say, with Sark in charge you'll be back on top of the game, and, seeing how's Sark's just slam-dunked Skolvikov's top lieutenant and five others, with Sark on top, guess what? – as far as the hierarchy's concerned, hey," she said cheerily, "everybody gets the chance to move up one!"

Locking gazes with Skolvikov, Sark grinned lazily, it was the last thing Skolvikov saw as he went down under a hail of bullets from his own side.

Sark didn't have it all his own way though, in the confusion nobody noticed that James had palmed a handgun. That fact only emerged later when the room had largely cleared, leaving just Sark, James, FPG and the senior crew. They only realised she had a gun when she yanked it out of her pocket and held it straight at Sark's head.

The K-Directorate men in the room froze. Sark slowly turned his head to look at her.

Christ, he was getting sick of people pointing guns at him tonight. It was getting repetitive. He looked at her levelly and unblinkingly. What had he always said about Drop Ins? Brilliant one minute and bonkers the next? This was a dumb play by James. Even if he caved, the others wouldn't and if she pulled that trigger she would never get out of the room alive. She looked like she was about to throw up with fright.

He wasn't sure what he felt. Anger? Disappointment? Not 'hurt' surely? Or was he just fucking bored? Either way, it had been a very long and tiring night and what he felt, felt _cold_. The camaraderie which he thought might have been building between them since the airfield suddenly felt a long way away.

His relentless blue gaze hit her like something physical. It was like being slammed into a wall of ice.

"Put it down."

She shook her head in response, unable to speak. She was shaking all over, but not as badly as she had back at his safe-house apartment, she was learning to command her fear. The gun looked ridiculously large in her small hand, it was almost too large for her to hold and she could barely hold it straight out she was shaking so hard. She got control over her voice just enough to speak.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, but I can't." Her gasping voice was stuttering and juddering, she was almost crying. "You have to let me go. I can't carry on doing this stuff, I can't - I'll get killed."

Sark straightened to face her. "Really? You want out? What a pity, and just when you were getting so good at it too." Sark's voice was breath-taking in its sarcasm. Anyone only listening to them would have thought he were the one holding the gun.

James backed off slightly but carried on speaking, voice and gun still shaking. If she were trying to get some distance between she and Sark, then it was a failure. For every step she took back he simply took one forward. As her gaze skittered about, looking for some safe haven, his remained coldly and calculatedly locked on her. After a few steps the gun was almost grazing his chest; he was arrogantly indifferent to it.

"Please! You don't understand." James' voice was cracking. "Even if you were never gonna kill me, you are a lightening rod for danger - I could get killed just from standing next to you."

True, but Sark wasn't going to consider even the concept of letting her go. Brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his clothing in a display of crushing disregard, he used the psychological advantage of his extra height to stare her down. "You could get killed crossing the road James, which on a scale of odds is a lot more likely than a lightning strike and a lot less interesting." His voice was silkily calm, and because of that all the more frightening. "Now put the gun down." A new, cold edge entered. "You're becoming tedious."

One of the ex-K-Directorate's moved for his gun. Sark moved faster. He ripped the pistol out of James' hand, turned it round on her, and shot her.

James let out a scream of pure pain as she fell to the floor, left leg shot out from under her. She couldn't stop screaming, the pain was too big. Part of her mind floated above it all, looking down in awe at how so much pain could come from one small wound. The James who writhed on the ground clutched her leg and sobbed helplessly.

In Russian, Sark explained the situation to the crew in terms they'd understand. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'woman trouble' but it came out: "Business issues."

They nodded, they all understood.

James squirmed on the floor, eyes tight shut and tears springing from them, her screams now replaced with an odd little mewing sound that broke from her throat through compressed lips.

Sark repressed the recognition that the agonised mewing sounded even more horrible to him than the screaming. He clamped down on the knowledge, driving it back from him; instead he made a calm, cold display of ignoring her and, following his lead, so did everyone else. Whatever concern he might have felt for her, he suppressed. Whatever feelings he might have had, he flung aside. Memories of anything that might have gone on between them earlier went ignored. He knew he had to be seen by his new crew to be in control of this situation, to be in control of her. He screwed down on that horrifying little mewing sound, trying to drown it out with white noise. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to stop it. He felt confused by it, alarmed and … then he felt a hot rage rising within him.

The conniving little hellcat! How could she? She put me in an impossible position! 

She'd challenged him in front of his own men, a crew who weren't yet schooled to obey - _I had to assert my authority over her!_ He considered that he had taken the only move he could. He'd had to shoot her to protect his own position and thus be in a position to protect her. She'd thumbed her nose at his authority in Switzerland, but here there was no fraudulent bond dealer to make a scapegoat of and her very public transgression had been so great it had demanded instant reparation.

Knowing he'd aimed carefully to only nick her with a slight flesh-wound in the calf he left it a full ten minutes before he allowed himself to unclamp his feelings and call for medical aid.

Later he stood over her by her bed, her pain dulled by morphine, his beginning to rage within him.

_How could she have done that to me, after all we've just been through together? How could she have not trusted me? _

"Get away from me," she hissed, half-crying. "The Government will find me, and when they do - "

For once Sark hadn't game-planned the meeting. He'd just felt an overwhelming need, a terrible compulsion to see her. He hadn't known what he was going to say, if anything. He never imagined that when he spoke it would be to jeer.

"What? The CIA?" Sark's bark of laughter sounded horrifyingly cold even to him. "Do you really think that an organisation staffed overwhelmingly by old men and young dullards are going to find you if _I_ decide to hide you?"

James looked very small and pale in the bed. He felt a sudden gnawing disquiet, almost akin to panic. This was all wrong! It shouldn't be happening! But his words seemed to come from someone else, someone who knew that he _had_ to gain an ascendancy over her. They were in a situation so delicately balanced that any perceived loss of control on his part would result in both of them being executed in a counter-coup that very night.

"The CIA are no more efficient than any other government department." He bit his next words out one at a time. "They are unimaginative, timeserving, clock-watching apparatchiks. They don't care if they find you or get you killed or simply wait for you to disappear at the bottom of a pending tray – just so long as no-one ever has to take personal responsibility for what did or did not happen. The CIA aren't spies Dr. Dodgson, they're bureaucrats!"

James looked so small, it was almost as though she had shrunk. Sark's disquiet broke loose.

_Christ, what am I doing?_

He furiously kicked back against that alarm and discomfort. He had to ruthlessly suppress any feelings he might have had. He had to get acknowledged dominance over the situation to protect them both from anyone who thought he was anything less than in totally in charge. He had to be in control! He was Mr. Sark, he couldn't be anything else!

Besides – _she hurt me with more than mere bullets! That traitorous little vixen!_

When Sark was angry he did not shout, the indication of his wrath was to the contrary. When Sark grew angry his voice grew ever quieter, ever lower, ever more cold and controlled: he was now leaning forward, only inches from her, almost hissing his words into James' face. His delivery was venomous.

"You put me in an impossible position Doctor. You flagrantly challenged my authority in front of a crew who would only work for me because they perceived I was strong enough to lead them. If I hadn't shot you, they might very well have shot us both! And I know you know it's true, because you're not stupid!"

He glared viciously at James, as though willing himself to see straight inside her head, to get some insight into what she was thinking. Her lack of game-face saw her expression crumple in recognition of the logic of his argument. At the sight of it, Sark suddenly felt a jolt of something truly unexpected: pure fear. He was terrified that she was going to start crying. He was terrified because he didn't know what he would do if she did.

_Christ, I can't afford to lose it!_

Something contorted within him, some emotion like a long unused muscle violently flexing and trying to break a bond. He felt threatened by it, lashed by a clawing panic at the fear of some ungoverned feeling arising within him and he found his words hissing out of his mouth of their own volition. "Know this - you publicly threatened to shoot me? Fine! It's payback time. You're back in Rambaldi Boot Camp."

He turned on his heel and quit the room.

When Sark finally slept, it was fitful. He kept starting awake, sweating, jolted out of sleep by thoughts that fled as soon as he roused.

The hour before dawn found him wide awake in his opulent private bathroom.

He was vomiting into the sink.

He rinsed his mouth and heaved in a breath, looking up into the bathroom mirror, remembering what he'd done and said to James. As sick as he felt, as appalled as he knew he was, he still saw only his impassive, imperturbable Mr. Sark reflection staring back. For a second he felt an almost overwhelming need to punch the glass and shatter the image. He ignored that need. He was used to ignoring needs, his own more than anyone else's.

When he awoke in the morning he simply told himself that his sleepless, sickened night just hadn't happened and then he buried the memory of it.

Among the many things that Mr. Sark didn't do was 'bad dreams'.

Away in Italy, Arvin Sloane told himself that he didn't have bad dreams either, even though he knew he did, after all he'd just awoken from one.

It had been about Emily's death.

She'd been lying on the floor, blood pouring out of a bullet wound, and when he'd looked down, the smoking gun was in his own hand.

He'd awoken in a crazed, fear-soaked panic, lurching about the bed, feeling for her in the dark. She murmured in her sleep and he wrapped his arms around her and curled against her, squeezing her tight to drive away his fears.

His face was wet with tears.

The dream had been so real.

In it he had known, for a few brief seconds, what it would feel like if Emily died with her life cut even shorter by the arbitrary injustice of another.

If that were to ever happen for real, he knew he would make the whole world suffer.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18: Giving The Blade** - _an intentional threatening extension of the arm and weapon designed to provoke a response that can then be countered._

Glaring at Agent Sydney Bristow a few days later, Kendall thought that Boot Camp was definitely where he wanted to put her.

He had hauled Sydney and Vaughn in for a further debriefing on their previous Swiss endeavour; just the three of them.

It had gotten bruising.

The missing magnetometer and the unresolved nature of the Caplan rescue hadn't been taken well at Head Office. Devlin had been addressing him Assistant Director Kendall, putting the stress on the 'assistant' part. It had been a message and he knew it: those above him were beginning to regard him as a man who possibly didn't deserve to go any higher. They'd brought in Jack Bristow as someone to ride shotgun on the entire Irina Derevko/Arvin Sloane/Rambaldi mess and now The Powers That Be were comparing him to Jack Bristow and finding him wanting!

Shit, he thought, all the years of service he'd given … the CIA didn't deserve his loyalty!

He had gone over the Switzerland debriefing again, particularly the precise circumstances of the Sloane extraction when Sydney's written report had referred to Sark shooting at her. Sark had shot Bristow's car off the road seconds after having hauled Sloane out from Bristow's speeding vehicle and across into his own. So that meant that when he'd pulled the trigger Sark was positioned slightly ahead of Bristow and only feet away. He'd been in a high pressure situation where it made total sense to hit the opposing agent, and he'd hit the car and not her? What was he, the world's worst shot? He'd been aiming for her head at point-blank range, but oops, he'd missed by three feet?

So Sydney was Irina Derevko's daughter? - big deal. Sark was a professional assassin allied with Arvin Sloane and Derevko was stuck in a cell and out of the game. Kendall guessed that Sark had been prompted by his own motivations, not someone else's.

He'd been prompted not to kill Sydney Bristow.

Kendall wondered just what the hell was going on between Sark and Sydney Bristow. And if anything was going on, wasn't it time he found out?

Sydney and Vaughn now sat across the table from him in an interview room, like the accused on some parole panel. He started flatly at them, projecting meaty disdain with the set of his heavy shoulders and his aggressively shaven head. They faced him in turn and he thought: could they have been two more different characters? Sydney had her back straight, chin up, gaze unyielding; she was angry but hadn't yet stepped over the line of actual insubordination. There could be no doubt what she was thinking though, _you're beneath me, you bastard_.

He knew where she got that look from alright, she wasn't her father's daughter for nothing.

Vaughn sat next to her, physically bigger than she, but somehow, in comparison to her, diminished. He sat with shoulders curled, chin tucked in, furtively looking up from beneath his brows, with, as Kendall thought of it, 'that fucking _furrowed_ expression' on his forehead. Kendall felt himself grow irritated just looking at it. What was it with that? It set him off just _seeing_ it! Then he got it. He recalled a paper on human facial expression that the CIA had seen as useful for limited interrogations. It had stated that furrow-browed anxiety, that anxious Kicked Puppy look, tended to invoke the common response of dismissive contempt. If a person wore it habitually, as Vaughn did, then that reaction toward them became ingrained in others.

Total fact.

Kendall actually felt himself brighten inside at the realisation. No wonder he'd never liked the self-pitying little fucker! He wasn't meant to, it was Mother Nature's way, she didn't _want_ people mixing with the little wiener!

Kendall gave Vaughn a lip-curled look. He weighed him up: crumpled face, crumpled suit, crumpled self. Christ, the guy looked like a late-30's version of the snivel-assed kid who gets yanked into the Principal's office for a misdemeanour and then tries to wheedle his way out of it by saying someone else made him do it. What the fuck was Sydney Bristow doing with this guy? What was it, a passing case of low self-esteem or … was her telegraphed relationship with Vaughn – the whole office knew about it - a monumental cover-up for something else?

He ignored Vaughn and concentrated again on Sydney, taking up where he'd left off.

"So then, you couldn't have escaped with Sloane and the magnetometer?"

"No, he would have shot me."

"Who would have shot you Sydney – Sloane or Sark? I'm a little puzzled on that, your report seems slightly vague on that point."

Sydney increased her grip on her temper and forced herself not to blink. They'd been in here for half an hour, going over the same dead ground, and it was obvious to her that it was ground from which Kendall was determined to dig up a body. She decided that it was no longer just her imagination, he was definitely circling the issue of Sark. She stared flat at Kendall and hoped to God she didn't have a tell that he'd picked up on. She had already suppressed the one she knew she had: when she was insecure she had a habit of crossing her arms and pulling the sleeves of her jacket tight about her, as though it were a blanket. She didn't know where she'd gotten the habit from, but she knew she had it.

She fortified herself with an old trick: 'believe your own lies', that way you projected the truth. She told herself to hold on to the thought that as far as she and Sark were concerned there was nothing _to _suspect. She hadn't done anything, worse luck.

Nothing.Physical.Had.Happened … She.Was.Telling.The.Truth.

She blinked once and exhaled slowly, bringing her heart rate down. If Kendall – if the CIA – suspected anything between herself and Sark, suspected that she anything but flat-out despised him, then God knows what they'd do to her. They had locked her up once over a mere _prophesy_, what would they do in reaction to her dark fascination with a known Enemy of the State who was also a man with Rambaldi connections?

"Sloane," she replied, "Sloane would have shot me. He was in the back seat and he was armed."

"So Sark wouldn't have shot you?"

Sydney sent a note to self: _breathing exercises Sydney._

"I never said that Sark _wouldn't_ have shot me," she replied with controlled even-ness, as though dealing with a particularly stupid and trying child, "Sloane was in the car with me and he was armed. He was my main danger. I was concentrating on him."

"But Sark didn't shoot you either, did he?"

_Fuck controlled even-ness!_ Sydney smacked both hands flat on the table top and stared hard at Kendall. Next to her, Vaughn jumped and instinctively dipped his chin even further and crossed his arms over his middle. He drew his gaze into himself, effectively trying to separate off from the exchange.

Sydney was too riled to notice that that there was no support coming from Vaughn.

"Sir, we have been over this repeatedly," the 'Sir' sounded nothing like a term of respect, "now what exactly is your point?" Her next statement reeked of sarcasm. "Are you implying I didn't try hard enough to get killed?"

She encouraged herself: _You go girl! Call that bastard's bluff!_

"My point, Agent Bristow, is that your report says Sark _tried_ to shoot you. In my estimation, Sark does not _try_ to shoot people. As a matter of choice he either shoots them, or he does not. So I would have thought that if Sark had tried to shoot you Sydney, you'd be shot. Yet here you are, unharmed. Strange, that although mere feet away from you when he pulled the trigger, that he met with what might be termed a conspicuous lack of success."

_Okay, so the bastard's not bluffing._

Kendall carried on. "You ran Ops with Sark in S-D6, Sydney. Ops are intense situations. People bond on them. When you're trapped in a fox-hole with a guy and you're covering each other's backs as some other bastard tries to shoot you? - it doesn't really matter if you don't even _like_ your fox-hole buddy; you forge a connection. So I'm asking you now, did you forge one with Sark?"

Vaughn gave a startled glance.

Sydney felt her heart grow cold. _Oh Shit!_ At the first debriefing she should have just told them how he'd let her go in Switzerland and let them make of it what they wished. Now that option had been closed down on her. All she could do now was to carry on lying.

She bit out her words. "I do not have a 'connection' with Sark." Sydney saw Kendall look at her with a curl of disbelief about his mouth and she went on the attack. "Are you trying to suggest that I'd sit here and lie to you?"

"Well I don't know Sydney, would you? Seems to me you're capable of quite a lot of deception. You ran a double game for a year and didn't get caught, you've lead both your so-called best friends on with a string of lies about who you are, why wouldn't you lie to me?"

A sharp intake of breath seared Sydney's lungs at Kendall's statement - _her so-called best friends_. Words of genuine rage broke from her before she could stop them. "How dare you! How dare you drag Will and Francie into this!"

Kendall was having none of it.

"What do you mean, 'drag them in'? - because of you, they _are_ in! Will Tippin got kidnapped, tortured and had his life wrecked because of you, and Francie Calfo has no idea that she's sharing a house with a magnet for life threatening danger and that she could get killed in the cross-fire - "

Sydney ripped across him. "Francie lives with me because she chooses to - "

Kendall ripped back. "Choice is only valid if it's informed! You have never informed Francie Calfo of the danger she runs daily in living with you, so you have never given her any 'choice' - "

Sydney heard a rushing sound in her head. She felt an almost hysterical anger. She wasn't going to listen to Kendall's implication that she was high-handedly risking Francie's life every day, and that she hadn't even given Francie any real choice about it.

" - so don't tell me you wouldn't lie to me about Sark!" Kendall finished.

Sydney felt a cool stillness descend. They were back on the topic of Sark. Mere seconds ago she would have given anything to get off it, but as an escape from what she saw as Kendall's vile and false implications about Francie, it was a relief to get back on to it. She forgot what Kendall had said about Francie, she refused to even think about it.

She looked briefly down at the table top and then looked up. A slight telegraph of uncertainty, as though she'd measured up all her options and had decided to come clean with the truth: _okay,_ _give them this as though it were the big secret_.

"Sark once offered me a partnership." She let the words fill the air. "Maybe he thinks I'm still good for it – so why shoot me?"

Both men in the room were stunned. _Partnership?_

"_What?" _Kendall's bellow filled the room. "Fill me in Agent Bristow! Exactly when did this world shaking event take place?"

"During my recent mission to FAPSE Headquarters. He wanted to present me with a 'comprehensive offer'." She hoped desperately that her next sentence carried a sufficient weight of sarcasm. "Apparently Mr. Sark somehow 'truly believes' that we are 'destined to work together'."

"And your response was?"

"I turned him down of course."

_Go Girl! Project that patriotic certainty!_

"What did you actually _say_?" Kendall persisted.

_Don't back down, give him the truth and make it sound_ _so big he won't think there's an even bigger truth hiding behind it!_

"I said that 'he was cute but I'd pass'." She continued smoothly, trying not to give either Kendall or Vaughn time to reflect on the implications of her words. "I did inform my Handler of the event."

After a second's delay, as though he hadn't fully understood he'd been dragged into the conversation, Vaughn jerked up, twisting to look at Sydney.

"What? _When?"_

Sydney's flicker of exasperation was utterly genuine, no need to hide behind Dad's inherited game-playing skills on this one.

"In the office that time, remember? I told you!" – _well sort of, enough to get by if anyone should investigate_.

"Well I don't remember it!"

Kendall interjected, trying to head off what he saw as the beginning of an embarrassing lovers' tiff. "Agent Bristow, what did you actually say to Agent Vaughn?" Sydney glared at Vaughn, not answering. "Agent Bristow," Kendall's voice grew firm, " I know you have perfect recall, now what did you say to Agent Vaughn?"

Glaring at Vaughn was Sydney's ploy for playing for time. In her mind was: oh shit, here comes the big one. _Roll with it and hope you can come out the other side_.

"I spoke to Agent Vaughn in the Rotunda" – _yep make it sound as official as possible_ – "and I said that Sark had made me the offer and that I had turned it down. Agent Vaughn definitely heard me because he responded: _Sark asked you to come work with him?_ To which I replied: _Like it wasn't even a question, like it was a done deal_. I went on to state that … in my opinion …" _Go for it!_ She drove herself at her next statement like a rider driving an unwilling horse at a fence. "I said, _Sark's like the good-looking guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer_."

Kendall was almost aghast. "You were flirting with Sark?"

Sydney slowly turned her head to look at him.

"Well hardly, if you recall, I was here whilst Sark was presumably in Russia at the time?" She waited a beat and then landed her big punch. "At that time, as I recollect, I was busily trying to flirt with Agent Vaughn."

Vaughn jerked a look at her. _Syd? We agreed, no gossip about us!_

Kendall glared at Vaughn. "Vaughn is _any_ of is this on your record?"

Inside her head Sydney punched the air in victory._ Kendall's past the flirting thing!_

Vaughn's voice stumbled. "No: I mean, I don't remember. Maybe. I wasn't listening to her that closely!"

Sydney's explosion rent the air.

"_What?"_ No need for any fakery at all this time.

Kendall closed his eyes. Sydney Bristow wasn't just Daddy's little girl, she was her mother's daughter too. Did she ever have fire! He didn't envy Vaughn one bit. Shit, was there going to be trouble in paradise tonight!

He weighed them both up. Bristow was off the leash with anger at Vaughn, who was about to get his ass kicked in a 'domestic' with his girlfriend. In his opinion Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn were totally unsuited to each other. The Bristow kid ran all over him without even trying. Kendall decided that as a couple he gave them three months, max, with a long messy tail off. Watching them, he knew that if there was anything to dig up then he wasn't going to get it right now and he had a lot better things to do than sit there and watch them spat. He ordered them both out of his office.

Immediately they were in the corridor Sydney and Vaughn had a hissed exchange.

"You were flirting with Sark?"

"I told you about it!"

"Well forgive me Syd, but unlike Sark and you I don't have the photographic memory thing going for me and I don't remember it all that clearly!" It was the nearest tone to 'snark' he'd ever used with her.

Sydney wasn't taking it from him.

"Oh really? And I thought it was because you 'weren't listening' at the time! What were you, distracted? Was I wearing a low cut dress?"

From behind his desk Kendall could see their silhouettes through the frosted glass. Even if he hadn't been able to just catch their hissed words, the shadow show of their body language would still have said it all.

Kendal's mouth quirked in annoyance. In his opinion Vaughn was just a milk-sop, a career apparatchik, he'd never be anything better than mid-ranking, he was nothing like his old man Bill Vaughn. But that Bristow kid? - she was tough. Thinking back on their bruising exchange, she was everything like her old man Jack Bristow. He almost admired her. Almost. But almost wasn't good enough. She could throw punches all she liked, she'd just coughed to the possibility of a partnership with Sark. There was something going on there, he knew it.

A quarter of an hour later Sydney sat in the privacy of a toilet cubicle with the seat lid down; it was the only place where you could be guaranteed not to be under office surveillance. She got her shakes under control.

Christ that had been close.

How did Kendall know that there was some _thing_ between she and Sark? No, she reminded herself, he didn't 'know' he suspected, and there was all the difference in the world between the two. He could 'suspect' all he liked, but without proof he could not act.

She leant her head against the wall, blowing out a slow breath.

The row with Vaughn had helped dig her out of it. It had run cover with Kendall, and the sudden burst of genuine temper on her part had helped give a legitimate vent to her tension over having to lie. Their hissed exchange in the corridor had just been fall-out.

Or had it?

Things had taken a sharp dive between she and Vaughn lately. She hadn't been the same with him since her night of self-revelation, she'd been more physically distant from him. They'd had sex - Vaughn had not unnaturally expected it and she couldn't find a way to say no - but it had been strangely lacking in intimacy. She'd recalled reading somewhere that the one act that most prostitutes refused to engage in, no matter how much they were paid, was the simple act of kissing on the mouth. Kissing on the mouth was - more than any fuck or blow-job could ever be – a sign of true intimacy. Suddenly, over the previous couple of days, Sydney had found that kissing Vaughn on the mouth took an act of almost steely will. This morning as they'd left her home, when he'd bent to kiss her lips she'd instinctively moved her face away. He hadn't said anything at the time, but he had noticed. He hadn't said anything contrary over the last few days, but she knew that he must have noticed the recent change in her entire demeanour towards him.

She bent forward and clamped her hands to the sides of her head, as though trying to keep her thoughts in. _Holy hell this whole thing is a mess!_

Every instinct she had told her to get away from Vaughn, to get him out of her home, to get some space between them. It wasn't even a case of 'get away from Vaughn so you can go to Sark', she didn't even know where Sark was, she didn't even really know if she _wanted_ to be with him, she just needed to escape Vaughn's constant nagging presence so she could get space to _think_. But … the thought struck her – maybe she couldn't get away from him? If she suddenly backed off now, forced him away, then would Vaughn, Kendall, everyone, start wondering why – why _now_? Would they start sniffing around the concept of she and Sark, and once they hit a critical-mass of suspicion would they act on it without proof? _And then what the hell would they do to her?_

She lowered her hands from her head and hunched forward again. The unpleasant statement that Kendall had made about her high-handed ways with Will and Francie's lives resurfaced. She swallowed. It was particularly un-nerving because Kendall hadn't been the first person to put that concept to her. If it had just been Kendall she would have fobbed it off, but her Dad had said same thing too.

It had been during one of their father-daughter blow-ups after each had revealed themselves to the other as an SD-6 double-agent for the CIA. Her Dad had said that she was selfishly endangering Will and Francie, using them as housemates and friends just because she couldn't stand to be alone. She recalled that her father's precise argument was that as a double agent in a dangerous game, to enmesh a civilian so closely in her life was an act of potential manslaughter. He had said that she owed it to people like Will and Francie to stay the hell away from them, that she should either restrict herself to relating only to those in the same game as she, or to have no close friends at all.

She recalled the shouted conversation perfectly. At the end, as she and her father had glared at each other, her father's unspoken question had resonated between them.

_Haven't you learned anything from the murder of Daniel Hecht? _

Sitting crouched in the privacy of the toilet cubicle Sydney's mind swerved sharply away from even the concept that she might be endangering Francie. Instead, she concentrated on another question: as Dad and Kendall had voiced such similar thoughts, was Dad talking about her behind her back to Kendall?

Right then 'Dad' was indeed talking to Kendall about Sydney, or rather Kendall was talking to Dad. Kendall had called Jack into his office for a private discussion.

Kendall prepped himself. _A quick one-two punch to draw the bastard's cards._

"Jack, there's no way to dance around this so I'm just going to put it to you straight. Is your daughter having an affair with Sark?"

"Jeez Jack, we've really got to stop meeting like this. People are beginning to talk."

Half an hour later, Jack was a desperate man.

"Irina, I'm coming to you because there's absolutely no-one else I can talk to about this. I'm going to ask you straight: is Sydney seeing Sark?"

"Oh my God, _is _she?" Irina gave out a blurt of shocked laughter, drawing closer to the glass. She recovered herself. "Well if she is seeing him Jack, I can assure you that he does come from a _very_ good family. Really, he would treat her like a Princess." She compressed her lips, suppressing a smile, knowing that Jack couldn't possibly get the joke.

Jack was aghast. "Can you hear yourself? Sydney and _Sark?_ He's a thief, a deceiver, a killer, about the only label he hasn't got attached to his name is mass-murderer! Are you seriously suggesting that it might be a good thing if Sydney got mixed up with _that_?"

"Well, who would you prefer she were with? Michael Vaughn?"

Jack closed his eyes in exasperation – knowing Irina had hit a weak spot in his argument - and put an arm out before him, hand to the glass, leaning on it. The on-duty guard shifted nervously, his whole body language projecting anxiety – people weren't supposed to touch the glass, people were -

"_What?"_ Jack jerked his head sideways and glared at him.

Man shook his head, holding his hands up in front of him. "Nothing Mr. Bristow."

Irina grinned at the guard's reaction and tried not to look at Jack's hand, his thick wrist and broad, flat palm pressed to the glass: mere inches away, but impossible to touch. The perfect metaphor for her husband.

Her husband. She wondered, did she really still think of him like that?

Before she quite knew what her words were going to be, she found her mouth speaking to continue their whispered conversation.

"I've said it before Jack, but really, he's not that different from you."

"Who, Sark? I work for the CIA, he works for Nefarious Inc."

"Oh please. I know you Jack Bristow, if you weren't working for the CIA you'd be running your own crime syndicate and dealing out merry hell to anyone who got in your way. Don't tell me you're a good man Jack, you just happen to be on the Government team."

"Irina! Don't tell me you actually _want_ your daughter mixing with Sark?"

Irina looked obstinate. She knew it was good cover, Jack would be thinking she was being stubborn over Sydney's choice of potential boyfriends, he wouldn't imagine she was buying time to think about something else.

Jack knew about Page 47 of the Rambaldi Manuscript, but he did not know the truth about Page 48.

Given what she knew about those two Pages, they were tied together surely, Sydney and Sark? But … were they truly suitable for each other? Irina was aware that Sark had powerful sexual appetites, another 'Lazarey' trait, whereas Sydney could be downright prudish. Irina knew that when interested in a woman Sark indulged intensely in sex with her, and in many dark aspects of it, but he wasn't promiscuous though, not in the accepted sense. She knew that unless his interest in an individual was piqued he largely put his sexuality on hold, just using whores to burn off his tensions. Only when his interest was gripped by a particular person were his ravening appetites fully in play: in truth, sexually he either starved or gluttonously gorged. As to who had attracted him in the past, well Allison Doren sprang to Irina's mind: an operative he had worked with for a protracted period. But even with Allison Doren, Irina knew that his controlling, somewhat cold sensuality had never really let him open up to an emotional contact. Whether Doren had known it or not, indeed whether Sark had known it or not, it was almost as though he had treated that woman as the subject of a long series of sexual experiments.

Sark didn't have sex in a boudoir, he had it in a laboratory. Sex wasn't something he did, it was something he perpetrated.

"Is Sydney seeing him?" Jack's prompt jolted her out of her thoughts. "I've been asked some very peculiar questions about my daughter today, I've denied everything - "

"Naturally."

"- but I want to know, is she seeing him?"

Irina closed her eyes and opened them again and then gave a playful, catty grin; a Pirate Princess with a cutlass in each hand and flying under the flag of the Jolly Roger. "Is she seeing Sark? Not as far as I'm aware, Jack." Well, strictly speaking, that was true.

Jack took in her long-held blink and found himself issuing an almost playful challenge.

"Irina Derevko, did you just lie to me?"

Irina closed her mouth trying an suppress a grin caught between exasperation and delight. "No, Jack Bristow, I closed my eyes because, although to my knowledge Sydney is not seeing Sark, well … I …" she blurted out, hushed, "well, in _some_ ways I wish she was."

"_Irina!"_ Jack jerked his head to check if the guard had heard him. The man was obviously uncomfortable at Jack and Irina's conversation, at their close proximity, but he was out of earshot.

"Well who else is there?" Irina continued chidingly as he turned back to her.

"Some nice guy who'll look after her, that's who. The world's full of them."

"Yes, and the last one she met got killed because of it."

They both knew they were talking about Danny Hecht. A good man. Headed for the top of his chosen field. A worthy husband for Sydney, and gunned down in the crossfire between she and her alias life.

Irina continued. "And the current 'nice guy' – Mr. Vaughn Junior - will get _her _killed as she slows down to let him keep up with her! For heaven's sake, he's a mediocrity. Why is Sydney even with him?"

Jack broke gazes with Irina, his jaw gritting because he actually agreed with her. His gaze plunged back to hers as he began to explain.

"Essentially, Vaughn was the first man she met after Daniel Hecht's death. He was attentive, reasonably good looking, and …" Jack's logic clarified for him, "and unavailable because of their Handler/Field Agent roles. I think that was the key. At some level she knew she could safely indulge in a girlish crush on a man without feeling guilty about Danny Hecht, because she knew the job was going prevent her getting close to Vaughn and so she would never have to deliver on her flirting."

"What? Those are _reasons_? Oh please! - 'on the rebound' anyone? And those relationships never last," Irina carried on, exasperated, "this one might not last because she'll get killed!"

Jack snapped-to.

"Irina, Sydney is old enough to make her own decisions. We may think Vaughn is completely unsuitable, but there's not much I can do about it."

"Oh for heaven's sake, sure you can. You're her dad – _ground _her!"

"Mom?"

"What's wrong?"

Half an hour after Jack, Irina had another visitor: her daughter. Quite a busy day in the prison cell.

Sydney gave a half-laugh at her mother's words. "Nothing like a Derevko for getting straight to the point, huh?"

She knew she was partly stalling. Her feet had unthinkingly dragged her down to Irina's glass cell but her mind had yet to catch up to let her know what it was safe to say. She couldn't really be thinking of unburdening to Mom about Sark could she? That was crazy: what would Irina Derevko do with the information? But … Mom was the only one around who properly knew him … who could tell her things. Mom was the only one who could advise her.

There had to be another way, a way to consult her mother without tipping her hand to Irina Derevko. Sydney desperately needed advice. Her unresolved feelings about Sark were snagging at her. She feared that Kendall and others were closing in on her. She needed _help_. She needed to _clarify_.

"Mom, when you left - "

Irina's head jerked instinctively, as though she'd been slapped.

" – no, I'm not judging you, I just want to ask, when you left Dad and I, you didn't want to go, did you?"

"Of course I didn't!" For once in her life Irina Derevko did not have to hide her true feelings.

"But …" Sydney continued uncertainly, unsure of what she wanted to say, "I just want to know, if you didn't want to go, then," she jerked a look up at her mother, "why did you?"

The two women stared at each other. Sydney suddenly felt mentally detached from her surroundings, untethered, as though she were in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. She had wanted to know about Sark, to obliquely discuss the quandary she increasingly felt at being caught in a possible tug between political expediency and what she might want as a human being. But now she truly wanted to know this thing too – had Mom wanted to stay?

Irina looked back at her daughter, unable to break her gaze. She was a proud woman, so how could she bring herself to say it, to say that she wished she had done things differently? Her voice stumbled. "Politics. Panic. Once I'd ran, I couldn't get back."

"Politics?" 

"I was younger then Sydney, about the same age that you are now. You have to understand, part of me still believed I somehow owed The State my loyalty. Mother Russia. All my training." She leaned towards the glass, desperate for her daughter to comprehend what had driven her. "You must understand Sydney. People like you and I, spies, we're political animals. Our respective sides wouldn't let us out in the field unless they believed that our allegiance was utterly instilled into us. They couldn't trust us otherwise."

Sydney understood, she knew all about instilled loyalty, S-D6 had drummed it into her, she and everyone else they'd ever deceived. She knew then that when her mother had realised she was under direct threat of discovery, she had followed her training, the mentally easy thing to do, to do as you were told instead of thinking for yourself. She had followed her head and not her heart. Sydney feared her next question might hurt her mother horribly, but she needed the answer, and her mother was one of the few people who could ever tell her.

"Was it worth it, living your life in denial of what you felt? Did you always regret it?"

Irina managed to speak, a small, choked, squeaky sound.

"I never stopped loving you Sydney."

"And Dad?" Sydney's heart was in her mouth.

Irina looked up at her daughter. "I loved your father."

After Sydney had left, Irina managed to collect herself. Like Sark, a part of her mind was always on run-time, even when she didn't want it to be.

That conversation had not been entirely about she, Jack and Sydney. She was sure of it.

It had been about them as individuals certainly, but it had also skirted about the whole notion of conflicting interests, about emotional loyalties versus national ones. Sydney wasn't asking because of Michael Vaughn – there national and emotional loyalties went hand in hand – she was asking because she had a conflict to resolve.

Put it together with what Jack had said minutes before and was it a conflict about Sark?

Were Sydney and Sark finally swallowing their differences and edging toward some kind of union?

Irina knew they would have to sooner or later. After all, although many Rambaldi players knew that Sydney was Page 47, only Irina knew who was Page 48.

When she had seen the hidden picture revealed on the sheet, there had been no doubt of whom was portrayed there, that line of forehead, cheekbone and jaw, that shock of blond hair, the cobalt eyes. The DNA code enshrined in the page's design had confirmed it, but it wasn't necessary, it could only ever have been Sark.

The acknowledged Page 48 was a forgery she'd had created to cover Sark's tracks. The U.S. government forces had imprisoned Sydney for her prophesy involvement, Irina had no doubt whatsoever they would simply kill Sark.

It was strange, she hadn't even been surprised when she'd seen the page, she'd always somehow _known _… felt a connection with him.

She didn't fully understand the prophesied bond between the two – between her daughter and her protégé - but she was sure there was one. She had not been able to decipher the new page before she had been forced to hide it and hand herself in to the CIA. All she knew was that she detected, at a purely instinctive maternal level, that there was no threat to her child from Sark, instead only some positive interest, some instinctive willingness to support Sydney. She only knew that – that and one other thing. In the manuscript Sark was referred to by a title, a rather suitable one given his nature Irina thought, if a rather sinister one: The White Devil.

Irina found herself hoping that when Agent Sydney Bristow had questioned her on the costs of conflicting loyalties, that she had somehow given her daughter the right answers.

Right then, Sydney's heart and head were reeling. She'd been attacked by Kendall, Vaughn's suspicions seemed to be aroused, she felt trapped in a skein of lies and … when her mother had spoken of her father Sydney had been faced with the horrifying suspicion that some loves never died. Some loves were inescapable.

She was grateful to spend the afternoon sequestered in the relative safety of a Situations Update briefing where she could collect herself. Vaughn was among the packed meeting, but she could avoid his eye. Her father was there too and she looked over at him occasionally. He'd looked back once or twice with what she could only describe as an analytical, questioning expression hidden behind his habitual blank-faced stare.

She pinned a grin to her face as she stared back at her father. Was Dad up to anything?

Kendall was there but he was leading the briefing. He gave his typical verbal machinegun delivery on the changing picture in various hotspots. He eventually got on to Russia. He referred to a new, stunningly successful crime syndicate which had sprung up in Moscow, rumour was that it was headed by someone referred to only as 'The White Devil'.

Sydney jumped.

Sark! 

She _knew_ it!

With all the force of the world's greatest covert Sark expert, she instantly knew it was him. It was Russia – a place she associated with Sark having first seen him there - the crime gang had announced itself on the scene with a stunning success ratio, a factor that was practically Sark's signature motif, and the alias, _The White Devil_, was the title of a Webster Jacobean Tragedy and had sheer fucking style written all over it!

Besides, there was something else, some other reason, some flickering instinctive knowledge … _The White Devil_ … She fumbled for it at the back of her mind but the harder she chased it the more it slipped away until she lost it. She mentally shrugged. Whatever … she just _knew _itwas him!

She sat tense in her seat, head down, vaguely queasy. She was terrified of getting caught. Had anyone seen her jump? She covertly glanced about her, she didn't think so. She keenly tuned in on what Kendall was saying. What did he have to report about 'The White Devil'?

"Whoever this guy is, he's headed a series of swift, stunning coups and take overs - "

_It's him alright_, thought Sydney.

" - and is surrounded by secrecy. The rumour is that he's in partnership with a woman, though if that's true, no-one is sure of the exact nature of the role she plays - "

The words detonated in Sydney's head – _a woman?_

Someone pitched an idea, wondering if the White Devil alias wasn't for a man, but was actually for the woman herself, that there was no man? As they'd all been burned before by buying literally into 'The Man', that idea took hold and the debate veered off in that direction. Sydney didn't bother to listen, she didn't need to. With primitive certainty she knew she was right, she knew it was Sark. The discussion crashed on about her unheeded.

She felt numbed._ Sark was with a woman?_ And it wasn't Mom, because she was downstairs … so …

Anna Espinosa? Maybe. Who else was there? She flicked through a list of names in her head, women with criminal connections, freelancers, rogue agents, and discarded them all. None of them was good enough not to be passenger compared with Sark, and Sark didn't carry passengers. Then a name came to her, a name so obvious that she didn't believe it – the name of the last woman Sark had been connected with as reported mere days ago in this very Situation Room – Dr. James Dodgson.

Sydney stilled, Dr. James Dodgson, a card-carrying, certified – some said 'certifiable' - genius. No danger of she being a passenger.

_It can't be true!_

Sark had hooked up with James Dodgson? Sydney didn't believe it, but then again there was the mysterious issue of how easy it had been to rescue the woman's family. No, Sydney still didn't buy it. No-one went from being an eccentric academic to being a super-criminal in under a week. No, if it was Dodgson then Sark hadn't hooked up with her, instead he'd hooked her!

The debate was ending and Kendall asked if anyone else had any ideas. Sydney jerked her head up and made to speak, but nothing would come out; it was as though her throat knew better than she what to do and had locked on her. The meeting moved on.

Sitting there, with her throat refusing to even voice a squeak, she abruptly realised that she had done. She had been faced with a split-second choice between Sark or the CIA, and she had unswervingly chosen Sark.

She was stunned.

She left the office early. Why not? - they owed her a ton of over-time! Besides, she had to get out, the whole issue of Vaughn, Dad, Kendall and now her elected secrecy over Sark, demanded that she get out and _think_.

On the way home she veered her SUV off the road to give herself time to be alone. If she got home early, there'd only be Francie or Will there. She looked about her through the windscreen and saw that she was on a sandy bluff overlooking the valley below. She knew the place. She was in the exact spot where she'd forced Sark off the road that time. Some unconscious radar had taken her right back there.

She was hit by a sickening thump of grief, fear and self-recrimination.

She stared blindly into space, her heart beating painfully against her ribs. She had just betrayed the CIA for a man she couldn't contact or control! She had just effectively betrayed her country. She had just wandered into a no-man's land between black and white, between angels and devils – a White Devil - and if it came to it, she could now be shot at by either side!

I betrayed the CIA and the nation! 

And then she remembered with crystal clarity the incident between them on this very spot. She gave an almost crazy half-laugh, bizarrely recalling the cars they'd driven when she'd shoved him off the road that time. Even their cars showed the gulf of difference between them! He chose to drive around in a defenceless open top sports coupe, she drove the nearest thing an apparent civilian could get to an armoured tank. To Sydney, right then their cars said everything about them. Sark's showed his verve, his confident assumption that his very quickness and speed of attack were the only defences he really needed, it showed his slick, snickering élan. She in comparison was enclosed, repelling all comers; she drove around as she lived her life – as though under a state of siege.

Something cracked within her. If only she had that time on this sandy bluff again, she'd change it all. She would have overcome her emotional cowardice and reached out to him, let him know it was safe to put his guard down. If only she had done that then, she could have spared them both.

She put her fists to her temples. _If only!_

Oh God, she didn't even know where exactly in the world he was, she might never be able to contact him! He could be out there right now committing any crime, however heinous!

She screamed at herself in her head.

_If only I had done things differently!_ _ He wouldn't have been God knows where doing God knows what with God knows who, he'd have been here with me in LA, with a government more-or-less pardon and working, more-or-less, for the good guys!_

If only I hadn't been such an arrogant bitch, he would have been safe now! 

Face clenched in grief, Sydney beat her fists against the steering-wheel.

When he'd tried to make her that 'comprehensive offer' at FAPSE, if only she'd just been less high-handedly dismissive! If out of the nearly 30 years of her life she had just given him _three_ _minutes_ to try and explain himself!

She hung over the steering wheel and burst into tears.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter 19: Camineering **- _a change in the line of threat or in the line of attack._

In the early hours of the morning that same night, Sark was alone in his private rooms in the Palace suite, leaning back against a bureau, jacket off, bare-foot, shirt loose, hands in his hair, almost despairing. He caught a reflection of himself in a far off mirror. Amidst all the chaos surrounding him he had time for one incongruous thought: I need a haircut.

A number of days had passed since he had shot James. Things in his syndicate had stabilised, he'd had the damage to the Palace salon cleared up and now used the place as his centre of operations. He had organised cold-blooded and highly profitable drug deals and weapons sales. He had engineered take-overs of bigger organisations which were further along the chain of criminal exchange, closer to the end-user and thus with greater profit margins. His take-overs had been leveraged not by money or junk bonds but by speed, ruthlessness and efficiency. The crime business was like any other: prey to those who were prepared, proficient and unimpeded by any sentiment. The expected counter-coup had arisen but by then his value had been so appreciated by his juniors that he hadn't even had to suppress it himself, his lieutenants had done it for him. With security established and the profits rolling in, their loyalty was assured.

He knew they called him The White Devil.

A wine glass and an opened bottle of Petreus lay on a table beside him, he ignored them. Truth was, he wanted something stronger, and because he wanted something stronger he wasn't going to allow himself to have anything at all. He not only had the pressure of the self-imposed situation with James to deal with, but now something else had happened.

Allison Doren had phoned.

Sydney had apparently come home early, utterly distraught, sobbing something startling about 'how she'd tried but she just had to break it off with Michael'. She'd clutched her cell-phone, jabbing Vaughn's number with shaking fingers … and had set up feedback whistling from the hallway wall.

The bugs Sloane had ordered installed in Sydney's home had been uncovered, and Allison, who had planted them, was worried that her cover was now under threat.

Sark had found himself torn. He had been suddenly furious at the incongruous thought that the bugging had evidently gotten in the way of Sydney dumping that loser Vaughn and part of him had wanted to snarl, _well get out then. Bugging Sydney's a dirty business anyway _- but he had not. He had instantly known two things. First, if Allison ran then Sydney would find out sooner rather than later that her best friend and house-mate Francie wasn't 'Francie' at all, but a clone of her.

Sloane had arranged to have Francie Calfo killed and replaced with a clone, the clone had done the killing. The clone was Allison Doren.

Secondly Sark knew that if Allison ran that that he would also lose 'Francie's' access to her boyfriend's - Will Tippin's - CIA connections which he had hoped to exploit for Irina's ends.

Christ, thought Sark, was Sloane genuinely a lunatic? Did he not see that if he ever wanted to bring Sydney over to him for his strange Rambaldi purposes, that murdering her friends was not the way to do it?

When Sark had heard that the woman cloned into Francie Calfo was none other than Allison Doren, he had thought his particular Hell complete. Allison. The woman who'd hurt him more than anyone else ever had, and now he was having to work with her again, when she was right next to Sydney with a knife at Sydney's oblivious back.

_Fuck!_

Allison had sent him electronic copies of the surveillance of Sydney. _Gifts_, she'd sniggeringly referred to them as, taunting him: _I think they'll appeal to your tastes_. When he had begun to play them he had seen what she meant. There had been coverage of Sydney and Vaughn having sex.

In his time with Allison they'd done pretty much everything: voyeurism, SM, bondage, role-play, sex clubs, anything Sark could imagine or devise, however dark. Sark saw himself as taking the same expedient attitude toward sex that he took to most other practical things: if he wanted something he coldly and calculatedly went after it until he got it. Even if it was bad for him. Especially if it was bad for him. Allison knew his tastes alright, but she had been wrong about imagining he'd be keen to watch the surveillance.

He hadn't watched the data download, well, not the sexual elements of it. He couldn't, he felt dirty, low, vile at even the thought of watching. He'd sped through those sections, partly looking away even as he did so, the fast-forward reducing Sydney's actions to jerky slapstick comedy, rendering them emotionally harmless. Instead he had found his attention caught by an observation of her, late at night, sitting in her kitchen. It had been puzzling, disturbing even. She had been alternately sobbing and laughing, pushing what looked like coffee beans around a countertop. To Sark's discomfort and alarm, she'd looked like she was having some kind of mini breakdown.

It had been a deeply unsettling thing for him to have to watch. Sydney Bristow, the pious, upright and unyielding Miss Manners of the spy world had been stripped to reveal a lost, confused, scared little kid? He had felt an illogical urge to reach out and touch the screen, as though to comfort her. He'd been deeply relieved to see her portrayed as walking about as normal in footage of the next day.

The memory of that had been one more factor in his decision not to allow Allison to run. Sydney still thought she had Francie. If Allison ran, Sydney would effectively have 'Francie' taken from her, and having seen the disconcerting surveillance, Sark now knew that Francie was a prop Sydney needed. He regarded Sydney as annoying, judgemental, immature, but still … he couldn't stop himself from _liking_ her, he didn't want to be the one responsible for tipping her over an edge from which even she could not get back.

He'd told Allison that if the CIA were looking for a Sloane L.A. asset, then she should make sure they found one, effectively telling her to kill someone and make it look as though they were the infiltrator. He'd hung up, cutting the connection. He knew Allison would be furious at his peremptory hanging up. Well, let her, she was three thousand miles away and out on a limb, she'd have to do as she was told; for once.

Their mutual, intense sexual history had left each with a certain sense of the proprietary over the other. Sark resented hers over him, and he was bloody sure Allison resented his over her. There was no denying it though, with Allison he'd had the most insanely hot sex of his entire life.

Accent on the 'insane'.

He recalled her. She was a fucking bunny-boiler alright, but God … there was no getting round the fact that at some level he _understood_ her.

The sex had been deliciously filthy throughout all the time they'd been together, that dark psychological delight never once letting up.

She was the only woman he'd ever let sexually dominate him, ever let totally reduce him to the level of a naked, gagged and bound sex-toy. It had been an unbelievable kick. He remembered the first time he'd let her do it, when he'd coolly decided to experience what it was like, for once, to be completely out of control, but within a relatively safe environment. Relatively safe, relative to say standing on top of a nuclear reactor which was about to go critical. Even now he could fully recall what the first time had felt like, the sheer switched on terror of being held helpless as she'd played with him. Eventually she'd started playing with knives - he knew she would, she loved them - not cutting him, but sinuously threatening to cut him. It had been one of the few times in his life when he'd felt completely alive, because he had suddenly known what it was like to _fear_.

She hadn't liked it half so much when he had gotten bored with his adopted submissive role and had reverted to type and turned the tables on her. It had been the other way round then, he'd held her completely bound and helpless and had done whatever he had casually fancied to her.

That was the kind of game he liked best.

She'd let him do it, thinking she might like it, but he had known her far better than she knew herself and had known that she wouldn't, and of course he had been right. He looked back on her: poor baby, she hated being told what to do, she so lacked any genuine power that she hated any external evidence of weakness because she knew it portrayed the actual truth. He had always known that all her strutting about wasn't an expression of confidence but rather an effort to hide her powerlessness from herself and from anyone else who might happen to be watching. He may have been a paid servant of Irina's, but Allison was a servant to many more, including to himself. She was the servant of a servant.

Having got her helpless, he'd left her with no option but to submit, and he had shoved her through every last one of her psychological red stop lights until she had. He'd shown far more mental cruelty in devising his torments for her than she could ever show in devising hers for him. He had promised her that he would and she should have listened, he always kept his promises.

He made a present of her - tied her with red ribbons - a gift from he to himself.

'_Did I give you permission to close your eyes? _ _No, I don't think I did. I shall have to remind you to behave Allison …'_

In that one, far-off afternoon he had deliberately set out to wreck their relationship with a bout of utterly destructive sex. He knew why he had done it. They had been emotionally close, so close that he could see straight through her, straight through to the unavoidable fact that with her driven need to be on top, Allison Doren was always going to betray Mr. Sark at some point. He had seen the way she had loved dominating him, the way she had _needed_ to do it, and had known that he had to wreck the relationship to get that hidden enmity out into the open so he could deal with it.

Next morning she'd come at him with a knife.

He'd been relieved really, with her deep-rooted resentment of him finally revealed, he could deploy that many more defences against it.

He had been right to think that she was always going to betray him, because later on of course he found out that she had. Just not in a way he had ever imagined.

That had been years ago.

They'd fucked plenty of times since of course, she liked it too much with him not to, even though she hated it. Sometimes he wondered if she liked it _because_ she hated it. In any case, it was always with the undertow of resentment on her part and an amused wariness on his.

He straightened up off the bureau, pulling himself up out of his recollections of Allison like a swimmer rising through water who gently breaks the surface.

He stretched, slightly cramped, he knew he wasn't going to get any orthodox sleep that night. Years ago Irina had taught him a trick with circadian rhythms – all the benefits of sleep from just a few seconds of inner meditation - he'd get his rest that way. He knew that one of the reasons his men held him in increasing awe was his seeming ability to rise above such mere things as the need for sleep. They thought he was inhuman.

He was suddenly angry at a separate swathe of recollections about yet another woman. Almost growling, he stalked away from the bureau, crossed the room and flung himself into a deep armchair. He was still furious with James. Indeed his fury had hardened and transmuted; distilled into some heated venom that he felt as though he might spit at her.

Since she'd pulled a gun on him she was allowed nothing that could be used as a weapon – if she wanted to eat she did it with her fingers, if she wanted to drink, she could only drink from a paper cup. During the day she was manacled to her desk by a wrist and to her chair leg by one skinny, and by now very dirty, ankle. They'd bolted the chair to the floor. He told himself she deserved it; she'd hurt him with more than mere bullets.

Still hadn't stopped her snarking though.

"_This organisation 'a yours actually gotta name? Ooh, I know, how 'bout 'Assassins R Us'? Nope, don't like that? Oh I know … got it!" _She had moved her hand through the air in front of her, like someone tracing a banner headline: _"Bodyguards Gone Bad!"_

He now had the problem of how to force her to progress with the Rambaldi projects. If he didn't crack on and get a Rambaldi breakthrough that would panic the CIA into releasing Irina to go after Sloane, then Irina was stuck in L.A. for a very long time. He had already called Sloane to tell him that he had shot James, he knew he'd have to report it eventually and reporting it quickly had given him the maximum chance of smoothing it over, presenting it as a necessary step rather than some evidence of incipient chaos.

There had been a silence from Sloane, when the man had spoken he had sounded distinctly cold down the line.

Sark had used the liquid anger he felt toward James to explore all her sneering. Where or why had she learned that mode of response? During childhood? If so, what kind of fucked-up childhood had she experienced, to devise a strategy like that? He had ruthlessly ignored the inner voice which had whispered: _one like your own_. Was her sneering an armour, a disguise she wore to protect something more vulnerable and tender?

He had tested it.

"_We're likely to be here some time, so when is your cycle?"_

"_Uh?"_ He had detected a stumbling pause and a blushing of her skin as she realised what he was talking about. "_Oh, I get ya, when am I 'on the rag'? Dunno, never was much one for clockin' the dates, I just wait for Mother Nature to show me the red flag."_

He had guessed the words were a display of vulgarity flung up as a defence, and had called her out on it.

"_Really? Shall I buy towels or tampons?"_

She had spat water all over the lap-top screen.

Sark had been secretly exultant. _Got you!_

He may have given up the disgusting threat to kill a child but he had found that he could get leverage in another way: James could be embarrassed, shamed and humiliated. He'd finally nailed the fact that her sneering demeanour wasn't a way of showing that she didn't care what people thought, it was a display that she did; otherwise why would she be so keen to prove that she didn't?

It was mean, it was nasty, it was cruel, but he recognised just what he intended to do. He was going to invent a whole new interrogation method designed just for Dr. James Dodgson: Humiliation 101. He was going to force her to engage in demeaning scenarios which were specifically designed for her to 'lose', and he was going to relentlessly rig the rules to make sure she did lose. Schoolyard Bullying the Sark way. He felt a fierce glow of what might have been pride at his newfound tactic. Almost a grim satisfaction.

_Because I'm a clever bastard and she's crossed swords with the wrong man this time! She'll learn her lessons, I won't stop teaching them to her until she has. _

He was going to take James apart and recreate her as something dependent upon him, as something he could _use_. Sitting, almost lying in the deep leather armchair chair, he kicked his legs out before him and bit his lip in vexation. _And then, when I've kicked away all her props and given her nowhere to run except to me, I'll tell her I don't want her! _

A fresh wave of wrath seized him.

_Because she deserves it, the conniving cat! She's got it coming, damn her! She hurt me!_

He took a 360 degree look about him, half a condescending check on the aesthetics of his environment and half his regular, subconscious, automatic radar-sweep for trouble. He was genuinely puzzled at what he detected: why was it that a place so grand suddenly seemed so squalid?

In Italy, Arvin Sloane cried soundlessly in his sleep, weeping with pain.

He would not remember the bitter experience when he awoke, when he wept with pain in his sleep he never remembered it – he only knew that there were times when he awoke fired with a certainty that a particular thing must happen. It was odd, he reflected, it was almost as though he'd been schooled to the recognition in his sleep, but he couldn't see how.

It particularly happened when he was in doubt over the issue of Rambaldi.

Sark's shooting of Dodgson had sparked doubts over whether he could create The Telling, because he needed Dodgson for that and now he had doubts over Dodgson because he had doubts over Sark.

When he awoke in the morning after his weeping, twisting night in Italy, Sloane felt fired by a certainty. It was time to fully acquaint himself with Dr. Dodgson's progress. There should be no doubt about The Telling, there should be no fear of failure because there could _be_ no failure. It was not allowed.

He did not know why he felt that, he just knew that he did.

He made his arrangements. Sloane knew that he had god-like aspirations but still, he knew that he himself was only human. He had no intention of facing the much younger, stronger, faster Sark without protection. Having had hired someone he felt was equal to the task, he was content. When he awoke in the mornings subsequently, he felt refreshed, as though he had drifted, cosseted, through sleep.

In his waking hours he was concentrating on Sark: the boy was potentially a danger and sometimes dangers had to be dealt with.

_Author's note_: to see how Allison betrayed and hurt Sark, see Evoness' great Sarkney fic, _Dark Knight_.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter 20: Botte De Paysan **– _a two-handed stab._

In L.A. Sydney felt the topic of Sark hanging over her head like a sword. The issue of the surveillance tapes of her home had brought a potential connection between she and he to the fore again. She knew for a fact that people were quietly mooting whether Sloane and Sark had bugged the house. She could see them muttering in groups, casting furtive glances at her, only for their conversation to fall quiet as she approached and then to pick up again as she passed.

With Sark back in the mix, any resolve she had felt to end her relationship with Vaughn had crumbled under the weight of her own fears, too scared to act in case of what people might say or suspect now the tapes had been revealed. She was beginning to loathe her own weakness, and she knew that if she wasn't careful she'd go totally rogue-bitch and start projecting all the blame onto Vaughn. Because that would give her what she wanted then, wouldn't it? The righteous belief that her inability to live her life the way she wanted wasn't her fault, but someone else's …

Poor Vaughn: sitting in the debriefing beside her, he looked drawn and battered as though the whole matter of the surveillance had somehow eviscerated him. He looked like a wrinkled, deflated balloon. She hadn't realised it till now, but he seemed to have stopped shaving properly too and was sporting a crop of grubby stubble … he looked like a hollowed-out shell of whoever he used to be.

She and Vaughn operated at different barometric pressures. Now that Vaughn had come in with her, he couldn't cope with the difference and was getting the bends.

The worst tape to have had to sit through was the one showing she and he having sex. Having to see it, knowing other people had seen it – not just Sark and Sloane, but worse, her colleagues and superiors in the CIA – had brought Sydney the closest she had ever been to 'breaking'. The sheer shame and sense of … betrayal; because everyone was right surely? – Sark had done this to her. Chase it back far enough and she would find his darkly glittering presence behind all this somehow.

Now she was in another fucking meeting about it, about it and the entire Caplan mess. It was as though Kendall loved dragging the issue of the tapes up again and again. Like he got some nasty little kick out of discomforting her. Well, she wouldn't give him the pleasure. She held herself aloof in the meeting, although a defeated Vaughn squirmed beside her.

"That's her!"

Sydney was jerked out of her bitter reverie when Marshall exploded half out of his seat, interrupting Kendall, finger pointing at a screen which showed at picture of Dr. James Caplan, shrieking, "that's her!"

Everybody looked at him.

"Marshall?" queried Kendall, for once too puzzled to be caustic.

Marshall carried on, unheeding. "That's her! That's Jimmy Dodge! That's the girl from my Quatzecoatl class!" He looked around him wildly, accusing them all with his upset stare. "Why didn't you _tell_ me it was her?"

His audience was so stunned by his unfamiliar emotional outburst, that no-one knew quite what to say. In the vacuum Marshall ran on, "I went to college with her! Why didn't anyone _tell_ me?"

"Marshall, you've been aware that this is the Caplan case?" That was Jack speaking.

"Caplan? Her name's Dodgson! Well it was when I … _you never showed me her photograph!"_ He was almost in tears.

Sydney was up and around the table toward Marshall without even realising she was moving, her only instinct was to go and comfort him. Ordinarily Kendall would have ordered her to sit down, but Marshall's outburst was so uncharacteristic that people were jolted off their usual track.

"Marshall, it's okay," Sydney spoke low, half supporting him as he dropped back down into his seat.

" – but they never _showed_ me!" Marshall's almost tearful hurt rang out.

The mood in the room had become unsettled, of all the people in it only Sydney seemed to know how to react. "Marshall, we're handling it. _I'm_ handling it, okay? _I'm_ on the case."

Marshall looked up at her. Ever since she'd saved him from 'Suit and Glasses' she was his unassailable hero, he believed in her totally. And besides, he suddenly remembered, they were dealing with Sark, and Sydney knew Sark, right?

"Sydney, he won't hurt her will he? Sark? He's not that bad a guy! You know him, right? He won't hurt her?"

_Oh Christ Marshall, why did you have to say that?_

Sydney forced herself not to flinch as she felt every eye in the room upon her as Marshall appealed to her as somehow being their resident 'Sark expert'. Her 'relationship' with Sark had never been publicly alluded to before, the topic had been too much of a loaded gun. Only an innocent such as Marshall, who saw no harm in it, would ever have been the one to say what they were all thinking: there's something between you and Sark. She sensed that Dad's, Kendall's and now Vaughn's glances held suspicion.

What could she say to comfort Marshall without getting herself into even more trouble than she was already in?

"Marshall, he's totally logical. He won't hurt her unless he has to."

Sydney had tried to keep her voice steady, as though being appealed to as SarkGirl was something perfectly normal, something that might happen on a daily basis to any female agent. Truth was, she was she was just about keeping a lid on a bubbling pot of mixed thoughts and emotions, chief among them being how the hell did she know what Sark would really do? Would he be professionally logical, or would he just hurt Dodgson anyway? How did she know? Did she, Sydney, really know him at all? He was a killer, a mercenary assassin, cold and ruthless. She'd held out private hopes that he could stun them all and turn out to be human, but all the time he'd been bugging her home and no doubt laughing at her having sex, stabbing her in the back.

Standing there, Sydney wanted to scream out her shame, grief and wrath about it all but she couldn't, if she started screaming and weeping out her grief-tinged rage then questions would be asked as to why.

Her sense of betrayal was total. _Sark, how could you do that to me? You bastard!_

She'd gone through hell over him, beating herself up over how she'd let him down, berating herself for having in some sense abandoned and rejected him, and this was the outcome? This was her reward? The revelation that he'd been a heartless bastard all along and that she'd been a fool all the time? It was irrational, she knew it, but she felt as though she had been holding out a fresh chance to him and that he had sneeringly flung it right back in her face. She wanted to weep, to keen out her grief, to mourn for something that had died, but she didn't know what it was that had died.

Why did people think she was the 'Sark expert'? Why did she have to carry the responsibility to understand him? Of all the people in the room, in the end when it came to Sark, hadn't she been the most deluded of all?

There was a twitching movement across from her: Vaughn. Poor, battered Vaughn. She felt a wave of pity for him, and a rage at Sark.

Mr. Sark, that gleaming ice-blade masquerading as a human being: could there be such a thing as an ice-cold laser? – if so, then Sark was surely it. Sark, a man who if the positions were reversed and he had been taped having sex, would have simply been sitting in this room now, dressed in one of his perfectly cut suits, legs crossed elegantly at the ankles, looking down at his no-doubt perfectly manicured nails and smirking in some barely-suppressed self-congratulation whilst everyone else squirmed in embarrassment.

Was it a bad thing that Vaughn couldn't be Mr. Sark?


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21: Raffine** - _a swordsman who will provoke a duel on the slightest pretext or cause._

"Can I have another cup of water?" James asked.

It was the day after Sark's determined realisation of how he was going to break James Dodgson. The cold, northern daylight filtered in through an ornate skylight. The room they were in was high ceilinged, grand, the walls lined with polished panelling and shelves, the shelves lined with leather bound volumes: they were in the library of his magnificent Palace suite. Pieces of high technology gleamed discreetly amid the old-world opulence. Sark was a boy who liked his toys.

He gave a long blink at the contortions of her accent. _Did the way she spoke actually qualify as English? _

"You _may_ have another cup of water," he responded with silky civility, stressing the word 'may' to correct her syntax, before he continued with a sudden biting coldness, "when you can pronounce the word 'water' correctly."

Following the 'spitting water all over the lap top' incident when he'd questioned her about her period, he hadn't let her keep a cup on her desk. As of this morning she had to request permission if she wanted to drink. She suddenly found that she had to request permission if she wanted to do many things which, even as Sark's prisoner, she had previously taken as a right. He had upbraided and criticised her on almost every little thing since the day had begun. The working day had begun at nine, it was now noon. Three hours of being destabilised, attacked, undercut. In reaction, a sense of being undermined and disorientated was beginning to swamp her. She hadn't realised just how much she had come to rely upon Sark's definitions and boundaries – which in their own way had been seemingly fair – until he had suddenly changed them. She was beginning to feel as she had as a small child back in the school yard – _picked on_.

He had shot her, nicked a bullet through her calf, and that had been bad, but this current treatment was worse. It was his cursory, blasé disdain, the sense he projected that he barely managed to tolerate his boredom with her: his dismissal of her. More than the bullet with which he had shot her, his remembered words had hurt her far more: _you're becoming tedious_. The sheer rejection and humiliation she felt was what truly smarted.

From his position sitting deep in a leather armchair, Sark watched the effect he was having. He allowed himself a small smile of self-congratulation, it looked like the blade of a knife. He could clearly see her discomfort.

_Excellent, it's working! She hurt me … and now it's payback!_

He continued speaking.

"I am accustomed to English as she is spoken Dr. Dodgson; you speak English as she is mangled." He calmly rose and poured a paper-cup of water from a drink stand and strolled toward her with it. On reaching her he abruptly leant into her. "Tell me, did anyone actually teach you to speak English, or did you simply pick it up from the natives as you went along?"

The words were delivered with a smooth unpleasantness in which he thoroughly revelled. He saw her face reddening under his attack. Good, he liked it when a perfectly good plan worked. He saw her move a hand to snatch the cup of water and he jerked it back before she could catch it.

"No Doctor."

"What?"

"Oh you may have the water, but I don't think you can be trusted to drink it by yourself, I think you need help."

He watched her face keenly, his unblinking gaze scouring it for signs of change, for indications as to what she was thinking, how she was _feeling_. Was that almost a sense of rising panic he could see? When she spoke, her voice was certainly shaking enough.

"I think I can be trusted to drink a cup of water by myself. What d'ya think I'm gonna do, try and drown you in it?"

"I'm more concerned with any efforts you might make to throw it on the keyboard, short out the laptop, and slow us down by the time it takes to get you a new one and download the information from the old." It was bullshit of course, but Sark wanted excuses to exercise control over her and anything would do. It wasn't just to get her working the Rambaldi problem, it was revenge. He was angry, she'd hurt him and that wasn't going to happen again. "Hands behind your back please, Doctor."

He saw her stare up at him in complete disbelief. "What? You are not gonna seriously refuse to let me hold the cup?"

Sark smiled down at her, a cold parody of a warm friendship. "But of course I am. Oh do come along Doctor, don't sulk, after all, I can always tie them there."

At his dreadful suggestion his face showed nothing but its usual veneer of _la politesse,_ in turn her face showed her bewilderment and unease at what was happening – at how Sark was behaving - but his threat held good because she knew he would do it and she complied.

He held the cup to her mouth and she attempted to drink. Sark's mathematical mind calculated angles and he deliberately tipped the cup ever so slightly so that when the water ran down her chin it looked as though she was the one being clumsy.

She instinctively moved to hold the cup herself.

"No," a sharp admonishment.

She reddened with mortification under Sark's reprimand. He could clearly see how unhappy she was. "This is ridiculous," she spluttered, "I could die 'a thirst just sittin' here. If you'd just let me drink it myself - "

"- then I wouldn't have half the fun."

Sometimes even Sark was amazed at the nasty little sneer he could inject into his voice.

Her face burned with humiliation as she looked away from him, shocked and hurt in one.

Sark batted away any disquiet at it and fastened on the knowledge:_ it's the humiliation that hurts her. Keep pressing. Do it again. She hurt you. She's got it coming._

"It's like dancing Doctor, surely some one has taught even you to dance?" His British accent pronounced it 'darnce'. "You remember don't you? Boy, girl? I lead, you follow? Now … tip back … there's a good little girl," he purred the last words and felt a callous satisfaction at the delicious mix of fury and embarrassment they provoked on her face, "…slowly … "

He abruptly tipped her chair back so that it was balanced on its two rear legs, supporting the angle of it against his inner thigh. As he knew she would, she tensed in her vulnerable backward tilted position, gasping slightly, afraid of being dropped. Leaning closely over her, he put the cup to her and let her drink.

To any far off observer, unaware of their respective roles as captor and captive, he appeared to proceed with all the care and tenderness due to the feeding of a baby bird who had landed on a window ledge.

As the day wore on, James almost tearfully found herself enmeshed in a series of unfair rules and regulations. And they were all utterly contrary!

Sark kept criticising her accent and modes of expression.

_But it hadn't bothered him before! _her inner six year old wailed.

Under the constant onslaught of his chill words, all of hers seemed to have deserted her. All her quick, sneery come-backs gone. She felt like Alice playing croquet with the Queen and watching all the poor cards race to paint the roses red, fearful of 'off with their heads' because the Queen had suddenly decided she didn't like the roses white! Only unlike Alice, James felt she had somehow lost her verve and élan, she couldn't find the easy, derisive words to dismiss the situation.

_But it's not fair!_ she howled within.

This time there was no private voice to tell her to pull herself together. She felt as though, in a few short hours, this new icily determined Sark, a Sark she hadn't met before, had pushed her back down her personal evolutionary ladder, stripped away her maturity and knocked her straight back into the schoolyard where the cry of _it's not fair_ was totally appropriate. It was almost as though he'd regressed her back to the age of six, back to before she had all her smart words and cutting phrases to defend her, back to before she'd developed her smart-aleck shell and she was just the little kid in the corner getting pushed around by bigger kids, held up only by her own inner moral compass telling her that it was all wrong, that _it's not fair!_

Her distress washed quite openly cross her face. Her mouth compressed into a small, unhappy, downward tick – _he's being so mean! I don't understand it!_ She was hungry, she was thirsty and now she realised with a jarring shame and discomfort that she also had to go to the toilet!

From a distance Sark watched her cross her legs and squeeze them together. Yes, his suspicions were correct, she needed to use the bathroom and it was an excellent sign of events that she quite lacked the nerve to request permission. Observing her discomfort he felt ever more determined to persist with his new found tactic of sheer, iniquitous nastiness. He knew it was working and was resolute that he gain his objective, that of taking James Dodgson apart and reconstructing her as something useful, something 'tamed'. Irina would expect it and he desired it. He couldn't afford to have James Dodgson as a disruptive force in his life any longer, he needed order and he was determined that he would have it.

James Dodgson wasn't a human being, he told himself, she was his latest toy, and as a child he had always played with his toys until they broke, pulling them apart to find out just how they worked. Well, he was going to break this one. If there was any other method of forcing James' co-operation, he suddenly wasn't interested in it, he wanted this one.

"Like to use the lavatory would you? Why don't you just ask Doctor, or don't you have the vocabulary for it?"

He watched her as an entomologist watches an insect … or as a boy watches an ant farm. He saw her glare straight at the at the laptop screen, not moving. _Oh no Doctor, you will reply, non-compliance is not allowed._

"Doctor, if you don't ask, I will see to it that you don't get. And I will only ask one more time, do you require to use the bathroom?"

"Alright, yes!" she hissed, stubbornly staring at the laptop and not looking at him.

"Well then, we'd better go to it hadn't we?" He moved toward her, taking the key to her bonds from out of his pocket.

"_We?"_ she cried out.

"Certainly. If you will try to shoot me, you can hardly expect any trust in return can you?" His tone shifted into an arctic range. "Didn't I explain another one of those little rules of Rambaldi Boot Camp? No privacy."

He saw her face crumple under the sudden weight of her conflicting emotions of wrath, frustration and fearful, tearful anger at the sheer injustice of it all. "Why are you being so mean to me?"

"Because you threatened to shoot me. That never goes down well."

"You can't go to the bathroom with me! You just can't!"

"Why not? I never did give you a full body cavity search, so I ought to accompany you now more than ever."

"_No!"_ cried James.

Sark mimicked her accent.

" '_No!_' Well, let me see, as House Captain for Team Bastard …" he rested his hands in his pockets, adopting an attitude of mock consideration - he didn't want to accompany her, it would be unpleasant for him - "we'll give you a choice. Which of the following privileges do you prefer? Either, permission to eat and drink like a civilised human being with the proper utensils, or …" he switched his tone to a coldness, "permission to relieve yourself in private?" He saw her flinch at the unfair Sophie's Choice between what must surely have been two basic rights. "And failure to pick one or any attempt to negotiate on the matter will incur a penalty of whatever I devise." He angled his head and looked down at her, querying almost scientifically. "Do you understand that?"

She glared at him and nearly sobbed her words out. "_Do I understand that?_ What do I look like, a _stupid_ genius?"

Sark stared down at her calmly, head tilted in that characteristic way he had. "Which is it to be, Doctor?"

She seethed almost tearfully under his gaze, but it was no contest really, she had to pick one, and he knew just which one it would have to be.

He watched her little jaw grind.

_Oh come on James, don't bore me by holding out for nothing, you know you have to give. Just say the words_.

"I choose crappin' in private!" she blurted out.

Sark almost laughed at her childish delivery. He raised his chin slightly so that he was gazing at the ceiling, his neck slightly extended, throat revealed, head faintly to one side. It was a stance characteristic of him but he didn't realise it, he never paid attention to himself long enough _to _realise it. "Really now," he drawled pleasantly, "was that a nice way to express oneself?" He clicked his voice up a gear and switched without warning to cold, clipped cruelty. "Respond again and answer correctly; speak politely and refer to me as Mr. Sark." He knew perfectly well what he was doing with his sudden alterations of vocal delivery, pleasant and then piercing, soft and then sharp. He was alternating between hot and cold, freeze and thaw. It was the tool nature used to crack rocks. His cultured, upper class British accent, with its alternately drawling and clipped delivery, let him sound contemptuous and scornful even if he were just casually saying hello, so now, when he was actually aiming to hurt, his voice was a lethal weapon. He switched to warm cosiness again, knowing that the unpredictability of his delivery de-stabilised and upset her far more than anything he actually said. "After all, if you're a bad girl," he continued, shifting down to smooth charm again, "you will incur a penalty."

He saw her visibly swallow a Go Large portion of distress and rage. She managed to speak.

"I choose the privilege of relieving myself in private, Sir, Mr. Sark, Sir."

Sark looked down upon her and wondered, just what was it about the Bayou drawl that so easily lent itself to sarcasm?

His greatest advantage was James' sheer lack of game-face, that her almost every emotion flashed across her for anyone to read, and he wasn't just anyone. If necessary he'd have decoded the Rosetta Stone if it hadn't already been done. He noted the small, unhappy straight line of her mouth. He knew she was going to come out from this hating, fearing and despising him. Fine. No problem. Bring It On. That was what he wanted, wasn't it? He had the method now and he was a ruthless exponent of it. In one short day he would lop off all the parts of her psyche that didn't suit him. He'd make her be the shape he wanted, a different, altered James. They'd fit together like hand in fist.

_And then she'll never be able to hurt me again. We're not partners, we're not going to be partners. We're not going to share, we're not going to be equals, I don't do equal._

He unexpectedly caught his reflection in the glassed door of a bookshelf and was momentarily taken aback; his expression had been the very essence of unpleasantness. It almost shocked him. He jerked his gaze away from his image and got back on the clock.

As the day relentlessly ground on he found he got a kick out of making her jump. Not surprising really, he reflected, given the little games he used to play with Allison Doren.

As afternoon approached he repeatedly caught himself circling her desk, repetitively prowling around her. He could have easily stayed away, verbally terrorising her from the comfort of a distant armchair, but he told himself that physical proximity added to the sense of threat. Sark had always known that any infringement of personal space was far less a display of affection than a display of power. He was an expert in power, he specialised in its abuse.

Some aspect of him thoroughly enjoyed the thrill of her fear. There were other aspects to him, but he wasn't allowing them in the game. They were going to stay on the bench till the job was done.

Coursing about her, he kept her pinned down with his gaze. Whenever she dared look up, her glance was unable to challenge his own and flinched away. After a while she had stopped looking up at all and had stayed still, crouched over the desk, almost unseeing, awaiting his next assault – just trying to ride it out.

His verbal assaults were many and frequent. Under the onslaught, James had lost any ability to fight back, she was just psychologically curled up in a ball, only hoping to withstand the emotional kickings and the mental freeze/thaw action of his terrifying switches between hot and cold, his sudden terrorizing shifts between the sinisterly pleasant and his cold that burned. He reflected that the only reason he hadn't had her brow-beaten before – say, in Switzerland – was because he hadn't really been trying. Well he was trying now, he was going for it as though his and Irina's very lives depended on it.

A late lunch had arrived. The person delivering it had taken one look at Sark and James and had dumped it down on a table and ran out. The meal was as ordered by Sark, sandwiches and grapes for him and, seeing as she was forbidden the use of utensils, a messy stew for her.

"How am I supposed to eat that?" Her voice was worn, hoarse sob.

Sark was surprised she still had it in her to even try to fight. He brought his face close to hers, his gaze drilling into her as she looked away from him, almost holding her breath with anxiety. "Not my problem Doctor. You should have thought of that when you forwent the use of utensils in your choice." He switched back to smooth, easy, pleasant civility. "Remember Doctor, you actively had a choice, and you did choose against eating properly."

"That was no choice! I didn't have a choice!" It was an almost ragged scream.

He switched to cold again. "If you will not comport yourself correctly then …" he thought, what piece of vilely unfair inequality could he engineer now? "… then, you shall forfeit the right to feed yourself at all. I shall have my men feed you until I determine that you are willing to behave like an adult."

James snapped.

Half-sobbing with rage she grabbed the grapes and flung them on the floor, then she went for the sandwiches and hurled them toward the nearest wall. It was a completely futile show of rebellion, but it was the best she could do, she had finally lost control.

Watching her snap, Sark shone with an inner gleam – finally, victory! At _last!_ He had _won!_ At the realisation he felt some hot, rolling thrill low down in the pit of his stomach. His body seethed with some unexpected animal excitement, but his mind felt very calm and very still and then clicked back in to order again. He had come to a conclusion; had he just won? – no, he hadn't. It wasn't over. It wasn't nearly over. He hadn't won because she hadn't yet _lost_.

"I want you to pick that food up."

"Why should I? I'm sure The Borrowers will want it!"

He wondered that she alluded to the British childhood nursery tale in an extreme such as this. To what part of her childhood had she been pushed, to mentally associate to a children's tale at all? A section of his mind mooted abstractly on the British element of the nursery tale, he noted that if you interchanged merely one vowel you could switch effortlessly back and forth between 'British' and 'brutish'.

"Pick…the…mess…up." His cold, slow, deliberate delivery was both shocking and menacing.

"The food has rolled across the floor!" Her voice had an almost hysterical edge. "How'm I supposed to pick it up from here! I'm chained to this goddamn table!"

Sark paused, he realised that she was very close to completely cracking and reminded himself that the aim was to break her spirit, not to shatter her. But some self-revelation came to him: _but I want to shatter her. She hurt me and I'm going to hurt her back!_

Un-nerved, Sark swallowed and backed away from the sudden thought, scrambling to re-assert his self-control. Total destruction wasn't part of the plan. It wasn't supposed to happen that way.

"Reach, dear Doctor. Are you telling me you couldn't possibly stretch out and flick at least some of it back with your foot? You certainly didn't expect anyone to clean it up for you, did you? You don't actually imagine that I or my staff relish your unsavoury surroundings?" As he spoke, Sark was shocked to hear his voice minutely beginning to crack and shake. He was horrified at it. What was going on? Why was he under pressure, and what from? - he was the one in charge! Without warning, he abruptly turned and left the room, blindly bent on getting out and regaining his complete composure.

He faced himself across a bathroom mirror.

_Why am I doing all this?_

He could have stayed away from the library, left to do other things, but he didn't. He could have issued any number of orders that she be left alone in the room, but he didn't. He should have done all those things, but he didn't. He knew that he should stay away until his complete self-command was rebuilt, that he should let her agonisingly fret about why he'd left, choke herself with fears as to what he was planning, but he didn't.

He didn't do any of those things because he didn't want to.

He wanted to go back into the library.

He felt magnetised towards it. He didn't know why, he told himself he didn't care why – if he still wanted a reason he told himself that he still had a job to do and that he was going to go back in there until it was damn well finished. That was all - _there was no other reason!_ He strode back into the room, filled with a white hot wrath, hell-bent on revenge.

Sark was literally breathing down the back of James' neck. He had been unable to pull away from her, gravitating about her in ever tighter circles, so he had made up his mind that he was going to control her. Now he was hanging over her, almost touching her. He leant over the back of her chair, his carved, unyielding face poised over her shoulder, where an angry angel might have been.

He sneeringly criticised the work she was doing on the laptop.

"Really, can't you go any faster? We acquired you because you were supposed to be intelligent, I'm wondering if we were wrong. After all," he sneered, "dressing eccentrically doesn't mean you're brilliant does it?" An exploratory finger slid over her shoddy clothing, as a botanist fingering the petals of a plant he might or might not snip, "it might just mean you want people to think you are."

James' face screwed up in response, red and blotchy with unshed tears of frustration, rage, fear and injustice as she tried to ignore him and keep working at the laptop. Sark drove on.

"Do you know that Neotech don't even want you back? They haven't even issued a reward for your return, they're not even looking for you." His laugh contained not one shred of humour. "The top management threw a party when they heard you were gone. With your research more or less finished, they had the project outcome and were still able to collect millions on insurance for your kidnapping." He remembered her isolated childhood and prised away at the insecurities it had engendered, enquiring with a malevolence that surpassed any mere cruelty, "What's it like to be so thoroughly despised, rejected and disregarded by all your peers?"

James burst into tears.

At the sudden sight Sark felt as though he'd been physically shoved backwards, he almost tottered on his heels: he was astounded. He didn't feel victorious, he didn't feel like he should … he felt alarmed, almost frightened at the startling display of emotion. He'd been expecting it, he'd been provoking it, but now it was here he was horrified by it. His voice betrayed a slight panic at the unexpected feelings it evoked in him. He decisively shifted towards regaining control.

"Stop crying Doctor," he clipped. She could not desist. "I said stop crying, it's a waste of time." Still the tears came. His voice grew harsher as his inexplicable sense of panic grew ever more keen – _why won't she stop crying_? "You're not listening to me Doctor! it's a waste of _my_ time and I want you to stop!"

She couldn't stop and Sark registered the raw, hoarse howling with an increasing dread he did not understand.

_What the fuck? Where is that grief coming from? _

Sark countermanded himself.

_What the hell am I scared of? – it's just tears! I've had grown men sobbing like babies before now! What's so alarming about this?_

To Sark, an Apollonian being of clean, cold will, what he feared most was the loss of self-determination; he feared confusion, and he felt confused now. _I have to stop that noise!_

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, determined to control the situation. _I will not have this getting out of hand! _"Doctor, I want you to pull yourself together and stop this disgusting display!"

His own voice was only adding to the furore, it's cold hiss alarming her even as the situation alarmed him. In response, whatever sudden fissure there was in James Dodgson suddenly split wider and her shackled feet hammered against the floor convulsively as she tried to tear her wrist away from the desk. Sark was horrified. It was as though he'd destroyed the human being and had left only some wild animal. She was starting to scream. He felt as though the noise was peeling some defensive shell from him.

He had to _stop _her!

Sark slapped the side of her chair, once, sharply: trying to get her to snap-to.

Her only response was to twist mindlessly in her seat, a horrible keening noise rising in her throat, breaking out like some banshee cry, like a dog that has been left alone too long in a yard and has finally gone mad. It turned Sark's blood cold. Wide eyed, he heard that horrifying wail and knew he'd made some terrible miscalculation: he'd pushed too hard and something had snapped inside her head … and now something was threatening to snap inside his!

_My God she has to stop crying! _

"Stop it! Stop this wailing!" He grabbed her jaw in one of his hands, twisting her face toward him, making her look at him. All he could see was the terrible disfigured expression of someone who had finally broken. It was as though he'd wrecked some delicate instrument inside her head and now he couldn't fix it!

_Jesus, is there anyone still alive in there?_

He felt almost hysterical. _Why won't she stop crying?_ He spoke ever more sharply. "Doctor, I need you to address the matter in hand!"

James started shaking her head frantically from side to side, breaking free of his grip, and that horrible wailing, keening noise just kept coming.

_I have to make her stop!_

Without any warning to her or to himself, in a complete panic he slammed his hand down hard on the desk, the whole structure trembling. Shoved on by his own alarm he pushed his face sideways to hers, almost touching her, glaring at her profile, his voice a bludgeoning weapon dialled up to a shout.

"_I'M TELLING YOU TO SHUT UP!"_

Before he even knew he was doing it, he grabbed a fistful of the scrappy notes she kept scattered across the desk top and flung them to the floor where they fell like leaves. James worked using loose notes jotted down on the backs of disused envelopes, on paper napkins, on anything really; working stuff out in her head before she committed the almost finished product to the laptop. Sark knew that, he knew that the messiness was an almost necessary corollary to her productivity, but stampeded by his own alarm he seized upon the characteristic and twisted it into a wrongdoing anyway.

"Look at you!" His voice was shouting. "Do you think that any of us _likes_ to watch you sit here and create a slovenly disgrace?" He mentally yelled at himself: _Christ, get a grip Sarkey! You're going too far!_ - but he couldn't get the self control to stop. "Do you think you'd even be here if we weren't forced to have you?"His voice rose uncontrollably to an ungoverned, hollering roar as he finally screamed out what his subconscious demanded that he say. "_I DON'T WANT YOU HERE!"_

_I have to drive her off! I have to get away from her!_

Suddenly, he hardly knew what he was doing. He almost gave way to a gripping urge to sweep the laptop up off the desk and hurl it to the floor – to utterly smash it, to utterly smash the works of Rambaldi which ensnared him. This had started out a few hours ago as a model for chipping away at James Dodgson, but now it had changed. The realisation sprang at him: it was now about obliterating her so that she couldn't hurt him, shooting at her till she broke. He could see the coroner's report now: death by multiple gunshot wounds to the mind. She'd hurt him, she was a danger, she made him _feel_, and feelings were … _were going to get him killed!_

He convulsively seized the back of her chair, gripping it and shaking it till his knuckles turned white, closing his eyes, fighting for his very self-possession. A battle raged in him, between that which needed to control at all costs and that which had finally realised that some costs were just too great.

_What's happening to me? I'M LOSING IT!_

It was war between he and himself.

She moved in the chair beneath him and the scent of a week of unwashed body rose off her. Furious, he ripped her up out of the chair, unfastened the cuff round her ankle and cast aside the shackle that loosely held her wrist to the desk.

He dragged her screaming towards the bathroom.

It was like hauling a terrified cat to the vets. She clawed and bucked and kicked,her screams rending the air as she tried to fight free of him. Sark's breath hissed in his lungs as he clamped down on her wildly jerking limbs, the wound in her leg oozing fresh blood as it split under her exertions.

He hauled her bodily into his private bathroom, trying to keep her limbs still. He clamped her under one arm, buying enough seconds to turn on the bath taps with his free hand. The vast header tank saw the deep claw-footed bath fill rapidly with a gush of steamy water. She screamed and struggled wildly, a lashing foot sweeping heavy glass jars off a shelf, smashing them to the floor, their expensive contents seeping out and thickly scenting the air. He grabbed the collar of her jacket at the nape of her neck and yanked it back and down, wrenching the item off in one go.

James' terrified scream came out in a high-pitched spiralling shriek.

Sark felt his mind starting to peel apart.

She tried to dig her nails into his arm through the sleeve of his suit. Useless. She got her hand back behind her head and grabbed a fistful of his curling blond hair instead. Better. Sark hissed in pain as she tried to rip a clutch of his hair out by the roots. He grabbed her hand and yanked it off him. She cried out as her fingers were accidentally crushed by his grip.

Sark winced, not for himself but in sudden sympathy for her. Christ, he had never wanted to hurt her … he had never wanted it to get this bad … all he had ever really wanted for them was … _to get to know each other_._ He hadn't wanted to hit, he'd only wanted to … touch._

His mind stopped.

_Oh Christ no!_

Horrified, he dropped her as though she were red hot and then he tried to step back. She dumped down into the bath fully dressed. The water rose up and splashed over the sides as she landed in the bathtub on her ass.

There was a stillness as she stopped screaming. There was a second of tension within and between them, and then both were utterly spent.

She collapsed in the bath like Ophelia drowned. Sark's legs buckled and he sank to his knees, clinging on to the roll-top of the heavy cast-iron tub. Each of them heaved in breath like two worn-out runners in some dreadful marathon. Moving like a sleep-walker he picked up her injured leg and propped it on the edge of the bath. Her clumpy ugly shoe was sodden, so he tugged it off and then peeled off her sock. He rested his forehead against her bare shin, holding her small foot in his hand, panting for breath, eyes closed. She got a hand out of the tub and feebly pushed it at him, it became knotted up in his shirt collar, her tangled fingers touching his skin. It was impossible to say if she were trying to push him away, pull him close, or just hold on.

She was so exhausted, he didn't think she realised any of it.

His breathing was so raw he was almost sobbing.

He gave up the struggle he had been waging for days, almost terrified at the recognition.

_You've tripped yourself up this time. You've got your fucking feelings involved on this one!_


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter 22: Arrebatar** - _to cut with the whole arm (a heavy blow from the shoulder)._

That night Sark panicked over something far more overwhelming than the mere discovery of some surveillance: he had feelings for James Dodgson, and he couldn't make them go away.

Alone, he leant forward over the bureau in his private rooms, elbows on it, head in hands, trembling. He repeatedly tugged at his hair.

_What am I going to do?_

Well whatever his feelings were … he collected himself, he didn't _have_ feelings, and if he did then he determined they were not going to master him. Yes, he would smoothly rebuild a bridge between the two of them, yes he would manipulate the situation into a different relationship, but he would do it on his terms. His loss of control today had been an aberration, nothing more. He was not out of control. He would get it all back. He would have the structure he wanted, not anything she wanted.

She was his prisoner, not he hers.

It was beyond him to imagine any other way.

The morning broke. Somehow James had managed to recover herself from the events of the day before, entering the library using the walking cane she'd been provided, rigidly upright, radiating resentment, she refused to look at him.

Born in a swamp, Sark reflected tensely, and still one of nature's own aristocrats: a damned Duchess.

He had thoroughly intended to utilise all his seductiveness, urbane confidence, bullet-proof charm, all his manipulative wiles and ruthless game-playing, to manoeuvre her into bending to his perspective, but her demeanour wasn't giving him the chance. He couldn't gain entry.

Unapologetic – Mr. Sark didn't do true apologies – he stared at her in the silence of the library, determined that the weight of his gaze alone would force her to acknowledge him. It didn't.

Instead – her face a closed mask of stubborn resistance - she eased herself down into her chair, putting her stiff leg out before her, propping the cane at her side. She looked down and about her, looking for the shackles that were ordinarily there, like a passenger looking to buckle up into a faintly irksome but accustomed seatbelt. They were absent. Sark had ordered them to be removed in the night, hoping she would note it. If she noted it, he could detect no hint that she saw it as indicative of anything.

She opened up the laptop and got to work.

At Sark's instruction, all her clothes had been washed and dried. Her hair was clean but tangled. Angling for an opening Sark unobtrusively ordered a hairbrush for her, antique, heavy, silver - it was placed discreetly by her side by a lackey. James ignored the item.

Sark flicked glances at her, glints of hard, flashing blue that went un-noticed. Surrounded by minions as he stood across the room, he found he was unable to properly concentrate on issuing the final details of a job to be pulled that day – the electronic siphoning off of 30 million dollars from the business account of a multi-national company whose finances were so overly complicated that it would take them six months to even realise it was gone.

His lieutenants left.

He gazed at her hard in the silence, boring into her.

No reaction.

Looking at her, registering her glinting, frosty indifference to him, Sark felt his jaw grind slightly. He was a man who didn't do feelings. He paid no attention to his own, he wasn't going to pay court to anyone else's.

_I know she knows I'm here. She's mine. I own her. She's cost me enough._

He walked with an even, measured tread over to her desk and stood before her, silent, head tilted, hands in pockets, staring down at her, daring her to continue to defy him even as he stood only inches away.

Miss Muffett and the spider.

His action evinced no response other than a slight pausing of her fingers over the keyboard. Sark stared down at her. As she continued to work and ignore him he leant a hand forward and silently closed the laptop screen onto the keypad, forcing her to move her hands out of the way as it shut, cutting off any excuse she might have for pretending he was not there.

She stiffened, staring in stubborn, mutinous silence at the patch of air where the screen had been.

Sark angled his head slightly, looking inward fractionally, considering. He was determined to breach a gap.

"I've noticed you never ask me for my first name."

She didn't look at him, just blank.

"Don't you want to know it?" he continued.

No response.

He folded his arms, still staring down at her.

"It's Julian."

No response.

He slowly leant into her. "I said - _my name_ _is Julian_."

She stiffened further, exuding stubborn resentment even as she slightly drew into herself. "Yeah, whatever."

There was a pause. Sark's face hardened. He seemed to come to some conclusion. He leant even closer, slitheringly urbane, almost whispering. "If this behaviour keeps up James, you and I are going to have a problem."

"Why? What'ya gonna do, shoot me in the other leg?"

Sark's tight smile evinced no amusement. "James, I'm not going to apologise for yesterday. So let's just suck it up and move on, shall we?"

James blinked.

"What?" she queried. "Move on? It doesn't suit you to talk about what you did to me, so we're just going to 'move on'?" There was a pause. "I don't get my say, _because you don't want me to have it?"_

"Always knew you were a genius," he breathed. "Got it in one."

A still, few seconds of electric silence, and then … she went for him.

Snarling, hands out before her, clawing for his face, as much as her damaged leg would allow she leapt at him. Half-startled but laughing, he reared back from her and caught her hands and held them away from him as she tore and jerked in his grasp, trying to get free, snarling and spitting and crying, trying to get at him.

He was laughing in dark delight. It had been unplanned, but he had splintered her. He had snapped that arctic defence. He had the gap. All he had to do now was keep pushing until she snapped in two, until she exhausted herself and left herself with nothing. And then - when she was spent and emotionally finished, when she needed someone, anyone, to help her gather herself - he would pick up the crumpled tearstained pieces and re-assemble her in a new shape.

And she would be very grateful, and she would need him, because being in any shape at all was better than being in no shape.

It was the very technique he used when torturing someone.

In her attack she got nowhere near hurting him. Not even close. A damaged, untrained, academic versus Mr. Sark? It wasn't even a contest. It didn't even take strength for him to hold her off; although James was coming at him with everything she had, she didn't have anything in the first place. He knew it wouldn't matter even if she got lucky and somehow pushed him over, he'd land unhurt and roll to his feet. He knew how to take falls, he'd been taking them all his life.

"Excellent James." He didn't even bother trying to keep the exultant laugh out of his voice. "Now we're getting somewhere."

She gave quick little sobs, tears of fury and frustration, and managed to tear one of her hands away, balling her free hand into a fist and pounding it against his face.

Sark roared with laughter, batting back her flailing hand with his, not even bothering to catch it. She was just too lightweight.

With frustrated howling sobs she started kicking him instead.

Sark skipped his feet back.

"Nope, sorry, can't allow that."

He caught her round the waist and twisted her so that she had her back to him, pulling her in close, trapping her arms against her, picking her up, one forearm under her knees so that she was a struggling, curled-up ball against him and couldn't flail out.

"Comfy are we?" He laughed at her efforts, pushing her on, shoving her over the edge. He needed her to break completely so he could put the pieces back together in a shape that better fitted his grip.

She started trying to bite; sobbing howls of rage breaking from her.

"Whoah. That's the spirit!" His voice held a mocking laughter. "That's it James. Really lose it!" He brought his mouth close to her ear and hissed into her. "Because the sooner you accept the fact that you have no say here, the better for both of us."

She screamed in frustration and anger.

Her voice cracked, almost at the edge of flooding tears. "_You think this is funny? _You think I'm_ funny?_ You think it's fine to bully people who can't fight back and then laugh at them when they_ try to anyway?_" She bucked, screaming. "_You think you can treat me like dirt just because you're bigger than I am?"_

With a titanic effort she wrenched, attempting to free herself. Sark gasped, trying to contain her, he hadn't expected her to be that strong. Hissing, he almost had to bend double to hold her. She was openly crying now, scalding tears of impotent rage even as she twisted furiously in his grasp.

_This is it, she can't have much left now, soon she'll be spent and then I can kiss it all better and put us back together in a shape that suits. _

Her tears didn't alarm him this time. He'd met these kinds of tears before. He understood them. This was that point in a torture where his victims wanted to tell him, because he'd stripped them down to a point where they wanted to please him - because they _needed_ him. He had stripped away everything from them. He was all they had left. Their only contact to the world, their only remaining human connection. They needed his approval. They told him anything he wanted, because at that stage more than anything else they needed him to love them.

_One more little push and she's done. Then I can put the pieces back together again._

He put his face close to hers, whispering, nuzzling, and gave that last little push. "Are you scared of me James?"

She sobbed, shaking her head wildly from side to side as if in denial of it, still trying to rip and tear.

"No?" he remarked lightly, still whispering. "Well you should be." He nuzzled his face into her again, eyes closed, sniffing, almost purring, "_Because sometimes even I'm scared of me …_ "

Under the realisation that he was never going to give, she collapsed completely in an emotionally broken deadweight.

Sark nearly went himself, nearly toppling forward, bent double with the sudden weight of her collapse as she quietly cried. He slackened his grip now because he didn't need to hold her anymore, the fight was finished, now came the reconciliation. He let her feet fall to the floor so that she could stand, although she couldn't support her own weight and instead just hung forward in his arms, crying with hopeless, open-mouthed sobs.

_That's it, she's spent, it's over._

Sark felt as exhausted as he ever had in his life. He realised it had taken almost as much out of him as it had taken out of her. Bent double, he lay the side of his face against her cheek, making shushing noises, and then grazed his lips along her neck. She was his now, there was no more fighting, he could do what he wanted now. He gently pushed a free hand into her hair, baring the vulnerable nape of her neck, pushing his face there, breathing in, smoothing his face against her, taking in her scent.

_Here … this is where I shall first kiss her …_

His lips brushed over her, quietly pressing against her, murmuring words.

"It's alright now James, now we can be - "

And then she did something no-one else had done to him. Ever. She found something extra within her. When it all seemed lost she found some desperate, inner strength. And then, she broke free. She wrenched with such force she tore a rip in his suit. Hissing, she snatched up the hairbrush and smashed it into the side of his head like a tennis player swinging a back hand.

Sark gasped in stunned, wide-eyed surprise, hand flying to his scalp where she'd cut him.

She faced him, expression contorted in rage, panting like she'd run a country mile, screwing her eyes shut and balling her fists, her voice a high-pitched scream of fury. "_DON'T … TOUCH … ME!"_

Sark blinked.

"WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?" she screamed at him, hysterical. "Look at you! _You think you're so fucking cool?_ With your fucking fancy accent and your oh-so-British ways, floating through life, sneering to yourself and _LOOKING DOWN AT THE REST OF US? Bullying people who are half your size?_ You _COCKSUCKER!"_

This was not part of Sark's game plan, he had not been expecting this.

"You think I want to be here?" she screamed on. "Trapped with a vicious killer _who'll never be able to change or be any better? You think I feel any CONNECTION to you?"_ Facing him, she was almost bent double she was screaming her rage out so hard. "I HATE YOU! - I HATE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO DIE!"

Sark's stunned face was blank with disbelief.

_She … what? She wants me to die? She thinks I can't change?_

For the first time ever, Mr. Julian Sark had just lost at his favourite game.

She hurled the hairbrush at him, and then the pens and pencils off the desk.

With an irregular heartbeat thumping angrily in his chest he realised he had two choices: hit her or leave. He stalked out. His vision was almost whited-out by wrath. Her words rang in his ears. Words he would not listen to, words he would not have, words he could not afford to believe were true.

_SHE'S WRONG!_

He went to his private rooms. Changing his ripped clothes, he practically tore them off. But all he could do was swap them for ones more or less identical: just another of his trade-mark Mr. Sark suits. Angry, livid, he took an abrupt one-second check of his reflection in a mirror and was hit by a rare flash of introspection as he saw his essentially unchanged appearance.

_That's you all over Sarkey._ _Try to change all you like, you'll always be Mr. Sark._

Startled, panicked, he slammed the door on the thought. He forced himself back into the straight-jacket of his persona, the urbane and composed Mr. Sark, the infamous Mr. Sark who never lost control. He stalked out of his rooms, shoving himself back into shape; there was no sign whatsoever that he had just been in any kind of conflict, either internal or external. He was told he had a visitor, a business associate who was waiting for him with James in the library. Striding relentlessly, Sark swept in with a controlled anger and saw who was standing there: someone small, wiry, unsavoury and oozing a smooth, sleazy malevolence.

Arvin Sloane.

He turned to face Sark with a typically false display of nauseating, congenial, almost avuncular concern. It never did hide the threat he posed.

"I'm here to check up on things Mr. Sark."


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter 23:** **Bind** - _the action of pressuring or enveloping the adversary's blade in order to make an opening _

Sydney and Vaughn were out shopping. She preferred it to being alone with him at her home, among the jostle of other people she could for whole seconds at a time make believe that she was by herself and that they weren't a couple.

She'd been behaving badly all day and she knew it. Dragging him from shop to shop and stall to stall. Leaving him to him carry her purchases in her wake, like some sherpa or servant. She knew what her little trick was and didn't admire herself for it, she was secretly hoping that if she just treated him badly enough then maybe she wouldn't have to dump him, maybe he'd leave her.

Telling herself that maybe she ought to try and make a go of it with Vaughn was one thing, doing it was quite another.

_But it's not Vaughn's fault – he's only guilty of loving you!_ protested her conscience. She squirmed away from the thought.

They'd washed up at a little market: second-hand books, flowers, vintage clothing. The day was so warm and sunny, the place so full of bustling people, that the scene was almost Parisian. Vaughn was a little way off. She felt freed from him for the instant and then hated herself for feeling like that

In the bustle of the market place she closed her eyes, trying to find her own private space – _oh God she was in such a mess about Sark._

As if to taunt her, when browsing a second-hand bookstall her eye had immediately fallen upon a copy of Webster's _The White Devil_. Her breath had hitched with a little jolt of shock, seeing it right in front of her had felt like some strange omen.

She had almost back-pedalled away from it.

Webster had never been a favourite of hers, too dark, too bloody; the man's plays seethed with barely trammelled passions. _The White Devil_ was a typical, intensely drawn panoply of Websterian themes: insanely possessive sexual jealousy, passions unstoppable when unleashed, power abused in the destructive pursuit of supremacy and vengefulness and desire. She didn't suppose Webster's plays were called Revenge Tragedies for nothing.

She supposed it said something about Sark that he seemed to have picked it for himself, or had it picked for him.

She'd stumbled out of the book area, past the racks of vintage dresses, and into the flower stalls.

And there she saw them.

The red flowers were so deeply coloured they were purple, so purple, they were almost black. Thick, velvety petals, inviting to the touch, but poised atop stems with sharp leaves and thorns.

Put them in any room and they would compel attention.

There was a whole body of them, all sitting in buckets, an island by themselves, just waiting to be bought.

She had approached the seller and asked the price.

"Honey you can have a discount. No-one seems to want 'em. People admire them enough, but they're all nervous of buying. I think they're too strong for most people's sense of décor."

Sydney wanted armfuls of them.

She bought bouquet after bouquet of them.

Vaughn appeared over her shoulder.

"Syd, don't you think you'd better ease off? I mean, they're going to dominate your house. Wouldn't you want something a little lighter? A little more like - you know – _flowers?"_

At that word, with a slightly nervous grin he whisked from behind his back a bouquet he had just bought her of daisies and forget-me-nots: pretty flowers, inoffensive flowers, little girl's flowers.

"Don't you prefer something like these instead, Syd?"

How could she explain it, how could she explain to this man that no, she didn't?


	24. Chapter 24

**Chapter 24: Passatto Sotto** - _to duck under an attack by dropping onto the free hand to deliver a counter thrust._

Looking at Sloane, Sark wondered: what was it that made him suddenly want to punch his fist right through the bastard's face?

Was it that he, Sark, was suddenly at the end of some tether, or was it that he just hated Sloane? Always had, but had now only just realised it?

Before, Sark had tolerated him; well right then he couldn't stand him.

All thoughts of any crisis he might have just had were suppressed, because now he had to deal with Arvin Sloane. Automatically switching into combat mode he calculated: was it Sloane's rat-like appearance that alarmed him, his utter hypocrisy, his seedy pretence at care and concern when Sark knew he had none, or was it the fact that he was a genuine threat?

Sark did not deceive himself about just how dangerous Sloane was. Sloane had no moral compunctions and was capable of justifying any action. That gave him a great strength, because 'going too far' was something that held no meaning for him. He was quite ready to transgress any boundary of decency, to sink beneath even the lowest depths of humanity.

Plus, he was another Rambaldi nutter.

That was why Sark was watching Sloane and increasingly wondering why he didn't just kill him, let the chips fall where they may and somehow extract Irina without him.

That, and the fact that right then Sloane was standing too damn close to James Dodgson.

And Mr. Sark never had liked anyone touching his things.

"Why Mr. Sloane, I didn't expect you to arrive so soon."

"Due to outside events Mr, Sark, I moved up my plans."

Both men smiled at each other, each aware that neither of them meant it.

Sark moved into the room like a knight moving across a chessboard, his diagonal entry drawing Sloane away from James. In turn she watched them with a dark bitterness. She seemed to have recovered some composure from their emotional shoot-out but it was clear she despised Sark as much as she despised Sloane. Sark forced down the spark of anger he felt at it and kept up his pretence of bland assurance.

"Would you care for some refreshments Mr. Sloane? I'm sure you must have endured quite a journey."

"Thank you Mr. Sark, something light would be appreciated. Though I think my companion might prefer something of a little more substance."

He nodded to the door behind Sark through which entered another man. Sark felt a slight jump. He hadn't even realised anyone else was there. He'd been too distracted by his hot, slithering anger at James.

Get your head in the game! 

He turned to watch the man: he was well-built, dark, and oozing a smirking, cock-sure self confidence. He moved across the room toward Sark. Sark didn't know who he was but he knew exactly what he was. People such as he and the stranger were like mythic vampires, on first contact they could smell each other out as the same kind, ruthless and deadly.

Well, thought Sark, the opposition's knight is in play.

The man held out his hand and spoke in a rougher British accent than Sark's.

"Hello mate, my name's Simon Walker."

Even given the name Sark had no clue who he was , which meant he was some freelancer. The two men shook hands.

"Sark," responded Sark, introducing himself.

"Yeah, I've heard of you. You've got a reputation."

The two men held each other's gazes. Walker insolently projected into Sark's: _you're younger than I thought_. Sark's smile didn't reach his own eyes as he projected back: _you're going to pay for that._

Sloane interrupted the contest, his habitual smile drifting over his unshaven face. "Shall we adjourn? I'm sure an afternoon tea would be in order, and you can let me know how things are going, Mr. Sark." He offered his arm to James as she got to her feet, her left leg still bandaged and stiff.

Something constricted violently in Sark's chest and he wanted to rip Sloane's arm off.

"Can I offer you some assistance my dear?" oozed Sloane.

There was a pause as Sark barely held himself back from tearing into Sloane. He saw James slide a jaundiced look between he and Sloane, as if tying to decide which one she detested more. Sark was astonished. _Surely she's not going to line up with Sloane?_

James spoke, addressing Sloane. "Back off pixie."

Sark felt a wave of sick relief. He caught the shock on Walker's face at James' riposte. Catching Sark looking at him, Walker enjoyed Sark's switch to a lethal cold when he taunted whisperingly, nodding at James, "Hot chick."

Sark quickly established that Simon Walker did not speak Russian. When ordering their meal he had called in FPG and, speaking Russian in pleasant tones, had referred to Walker in the vilest terms imaginable with the man standing right next to him. Walker didn't flinch, he didn't know when he was being insulted.

Sark knew Sloane wasn't fully fluent in the language, so speaking rapidly and using slang he told FPG to attend and to come inconspicuously armed. He also told him to put the word out, any shooting within and a crew were to instantly assault and were to shoot to kill on the visitors.

Sark sat down to tea with Sloane, trying to disguise his tension.

An edgy but very British 'afternoon tea', complete with Earl Grey, seed cake and cucumber sandwiches, took place around a low coffee table. It was attended by Sark, Simon Walker, Sloane, the man-mountain impassivity of FPG, and James. In other words, by a frighteningly young assassin of world renown, a deadly freelancer, a megalomaniac bent on world domination, a Russian Mafia hard-man and a 'mad professor'.

For her part, James - mutinous, angry - took in the strangeness of their little group and wondered if there was a dormouse asleep in the teapot.

She had never wanted to be anywhere less in her life. 'Trapped between a rock and a hard place' didn't even begin to cover it. She could sense that Sark and Sloane were headed for a showdown and that she was going to have to make a choice as to just whose side she was on – that of a crazed maniac or a disgusting career-criminal she personally hated. She listened keenly as Sloane and Sark angled for an edge on each other.

"Do you really think we need your companion in attendance?" Sloane asked of Sark, indicating FPG.

"Do you think we need yours?" Sark countered, indicating Simon Walker.

Sloane fought down the urge to blink at Sark's unyielding response. What was going on? Sark wasn't someone who challenged his superiors, Sark wasn't a rebel, Sark took orders. Just what new factors had come into play here? He angled for another pass.

"I think Mr. Walker has come a long way and deserves our hospitality, Mr. Sark."

"He has my hospitality, Mr. Sloane, " - _because the fucker's not dead yet_ – "but in my own home I will invite whomsoever I choose as a dining companion. My choice of companion stays."

"I didn't realise this _was_ your home Mr. Sark. I thought that it was Irina's or that somehow – forgive me – that I were bank-rolling you." He gave a chuckle of fond indulgence, like a kindly uncle implying he could absolve Sark for his current mis-judgement if he would just do the sensible thing and back down. "But excuse me, perhaps I'm mistaken." Sloane smilingly leant back in his seat, confident that his implicit threat would corral Sark and remind him of his place. It didn't.

Sark, frustrated, angry at James, contemptuous of Sloane, in some way furious at himself, flung down his statement of independence instead. "You _are_ mistaken."

The temperature in the room dropped two degrees.

Sloane blinked. James stiffened: _this is it!_ Sark carried on smoothly.

"You were certainly kind enough to fund me earlier and for that I am thankful, but this is my domain. I do have financial resources of my own Mr. Sloane, and my organisation has certainly proved itself lucrative, even in the short time of its existence. I no longer require your assistance, although of course you do have my gratitude."

Simon Walker sensed the atmosphere and shifted inconspicuously, giving himself easier access to his gun.

James spotted his action and got in the game. She picked her team, she picked Sark. A career-criminal or a maniac? It was an unfair choice, a crazily limited one, but the outcome was never in doubt: it was always going to have to be Sark whether she liked it or not. She reached across and condescendingly patted Walker on his trigger arm as he shifted uneasily. "Easy tiger, just you sit still now and let the grown-ups do the talking." An embarrassed Walker shifted his gaze to Sloane, looking for some kind of indication as to what to do. It was then that James turned to FPG and spoke in the most horrendously accented Russian Sark had ever heard.

"When it starts, shoot the little guy, he's the danger."

Sloane's face was a picture of surprise, he wasn't sure what she'd said, her accent was too bad, but he was stunned that she could speak any Russian at all. It was a matter of fact, Dodgson spoke only English. What? – she had taught herself to speak Russian, and in a few days?

Sark's face evidenced a gleam of delight, both at James' revealed talent and at what she had said. Whether she liked it or not, whether she hated him or not, she was still on his team!

She could struggle all she liked and defy him all she wanted, but it was not over between them yet!

"Yeah I know," James explained to all, "I didn't speak Russian, probably still don't given the accent - but what can I say, I'm a quick study, a good listener and I've had the incentive to learn."

"You impress me my dear," slid Sloane.

"Hardly difficult."

"My dear, you should learn that a lady graciously accepts a compliment."

James hit back, bland and bored. "Shut up."

A smirking, smiling Sark indicated the teapot to a discomfited Walker, "More tea?"

Sloane hoped his unctuous smile concealed his astonishment. The situation seemed to be slipping away from him. He'd lost his grip on Sark. And Sark and Dodgson … they seemed to have done the unimaginable given their wildly differing natures and the situation which had flung them together, they were teaming up against him. He knew himself so little that he did not understand that when he smiled he telegraphed deceit in any case.

James read the telegram.

Sloane's slow unctuous voice peeled out words. "Doctor Dodgson, I am surprised at just how willing you are to extend benevolence to Mr. Sark." He made his play, attempting to split their partnership, "After all, he did shoot you."

Sark felt the air hiss in his lungs –_ you're dead you fucker!_

James' expression flickered in anger, Sloane had hit a target, he had reminded her of all the rage she felt toward Sark. Livid, she smiled with a frosty grace toward Simon Walker, "I'll pour," and picked up the pot and flung the scalding contents into the freelancer's lap.

The group convulsed in a single surge of activity which halted with Sark and Walker pointing holding guns to each other's heads and FPG holding Arvin Sloane at gunpoint.

Stand off.

James appraised the situation, face a mask of furious contempt for everyone concerned.

"Well, at least we've cleared the polite shit out the way," she hissed, glaring at Sloane. "Let me clarify things. I ordinarily couldn't give a rat's-ass what you people do to each other, but to maximise my own chances of living, let me lay it straight. If your guy shoots Sark, our guy," she indicated an unblinking FPG with a jerk of her head, "shoots you. Have you got that?"

"It is abundantly clear, Dr. Dodgson."

"Then from now on in Rat-Guy, don't fuck with me." James continued to hold Sloane's gaze even as she issued an order to Walker. "You - Mr. 'I'm Aries What's Your Star Sign?' - put your gun down."

Sloane, swallowing, gave an almost imperceptible nod to Walker.

James reached out for Walker's weapon, simultaneously speaking to FPG in her atrocious Russian. "If the runt moves, shoot."

FPG steadied his aim on Sloane, the intent of his movement was clear to all.

James tugged the weapon out of Walker's unresisting hand and gave it to FPG who now had a double lock-down on Sloane – a gun in each fist.

Tense, Sark watched her from out of the corner of his eye. Even now could they come out of this with their differences put aside, allied as they were against Arvin Sloane? If he got a second chance, could he make it work out right?

Sark shelved his considerations and dealt with the present. He addressed Walker with a silky urbanity, still holding his gun on him. "Put your hands in the air or I will shoot you." Walker raised his hands, hissing with pain as his movement caused his jeans to catch against his scalded crotch. "I am going to give you two choices Mr. Walker, either stay here and attempt to 'protect' Mr. Sloane in your current damaged state, or leave in the company of my men whereupon you can douse some cold water on those scalded bollocks of yours." Sark couldn't quite keep the laugh out of his voice. "Arvin Sloane or your balls. I'm sure that any future Mrs. Walker would be grateful if you made the wise choice."

Walker's expression was one of bottled rage; angry but compliant. Sark dog-whistled and two of his men came in, guns at the ready, Sark issued the orders and they carted Walker out – any trouble and they would shoot him.

The remainder of the tea party reconvened. Sark had the excited, jumpy thrill that went through him when he could feel it going his way. James was grindingly, gloweringly angry, still furious at having to pick between the devil and the deep blue. Sloane recommenced his efforts to outflank Sark. Whatever else Sloane was, he was not someone who just gave up.

"Mr. Sark, you are making a mistake in setting yourself up in opposition against me - "

"I am not setting myself up in opposition against you, I am setting myself up in business. I see no reason for us not to co-operate when our mutual interests would be served."

Sloane thought he detected a micron of weakness in Sark's angling away from flat-out opposition, he threw every ounce of oozing persuasion he had into exploiting it. "Mr. Sark, if we pursue the works of Rambaldi together, I can offer you power and control beyond your imagining."

James broke in with sneering disbelief. "Power and control _beyond _his imagining? He's got too much as it is. Now what the fuck do you want?"

Diverted, Sloane instead felt for a weakness in James. He already knew that Sark's weakness was the pursuit of power, what was hers, intellectual vanity?

"I require you to help me with the building of certain Rambaldi devices Doctor." His expression shifted to one of melting concern as his gaze held hers, his voice sibilant. James was irresistibly reminded of the googly eyed snake in _Jungle Book_. "With the greatest of respect to Mr. Sark, right now you are far more important that he is. Mr. Sark is … a variation on a gifted business man; you Doctor, are a genius with - I suspect - a unique understanding of the works of Rambaldi."

James' response was gunslinger fast and sharp-shooter accurate. "Quit the 'divide and conquer' tactics, ass-hat. Get to the point."

Sloane blinked, if Dodgson had a weakness it wasn't intellectual vanity. He kept pushing, feeling for an angle of attack. "I need you to complete the current device you are working on Doctor, and then … I will be gone forever from your own and Mr. Sark's lives."

Sark thought two words: _Lying _and _Bastard_.

James just laughed. "What, you seriously think I'm gonna give you the answer to the current box of tricks I'm working on?"

Sloane probed, trying to determine how far on she was with the project. "What would that box of tricks be Doctor?"

"Oh I think you already know which is why I don't mind telling you, you're problem is you just don't know how to build it. It's the equivalent of a re-usable neutron bomb in a suitcase."

_Fuck!_ Sark just about kept his face straight. _They were working on a what? _He got an iron grip on himself. _That fucking maniac Rambaldi,_ _no wonder the fifteenth century Vatican had him whacked! _

"A device not far on from what military science can currently devise Doctor," responded Sloane, "so why be shocked at it? I will merely sell the theory and the hardware on to the highest bidder, in this case, I suspect, to the U.S. Government."

James looked at Sloane with sneering dismissal. Sloane saw that there was no co-operation forthcoming there. As he realised he was getting nowhere with Dodgson, he switched his invidious, undermining attack back to Sark. "Do you have any other opinion on the matter Mr. Sark? After all, there is a great deal of money to be made."

_Yeah, my opinion is 'fuck off and die' you arsehole! _

Sark felt almost soiled. _Money?_ Sloane thought that on an issue like this he could be swayed by mere _money?_ He coldly looked at Sloane. Sitting there Sark was struck by an almost poetic thought: he considered that although Sloane and Rambaldi had lived centuries apart they were still fitting accomplices. Both had blackened souls.

Sark made up his mind, he had heard enough – a re-usable neutron bomb in a suitcase? He was going to order Sloane's execution right there, right then; the man wasn't leaving the room alive. Irina could be extracted somehow later. Freed from Sloane and Rambaldi he would sort the situation out with James, he would leverage it so that she saw it his way. And okay, so this would be one more death she would have to witness close up, but it couldn't be helped. He turned to say the words, to issue the death sentence for FPG to enact, when he felt a beating pulse against his wrist. It was his watch.

Irina.

_Oh sodding hell! That women knows just when to pick her moment!_

He decoded her signal, it reminded him of what had always been his core objective: _I have an out, but I need Sloane's help to do it._

Sark and James were in hissed conference, away in a far corner while FPG held Sloane at unyielding gunpoint.

"You cannot be fucking serious! You are giving him a Doomsday machine!"

"Which elements of certain governments are probably very close to creating anyway. Sloane was certainly right about that."

"This is just about _money?"_

"No!" Sark fought down his anxiety and distaste, he had to get her to believe him. "It has nothing to do with money – look around you, I don't need money." He looked about himself and realised he was telling the truth, he already had power and wealth enough, for the first time in his life he realised that he didn't need more. "It's to do with … I have to help someone. I have to rescue them and right now the best way I can do it is to go along with Sloane."

He _had_ to get Irina out of that glass box. As the only person on the planet she could communicate with she'd placed her faith in him totally. He couldn't just leave her there, it would be like sitting idly back to watch the struggles of a cat in a sack, flung into a canal to drown.

He couldn't do that, after all, he knew she'd never do it to him.

Beneath her sneering fury he saw James register some flicker of weakness, some sympathy with his predicament. With a queasy recognition he recalled exactly why it was that she knew just what it felt like to have a hostage held against you. He shoved the knowledge away from him and pursued his point.

"I know Sloane. He will never use that weapon. He knows it will bring the wrath of every government agency in the world down on his back. He won't use it, he will simply sell it. When he does, if it's not to a stable government then I will steal it back or destroy it and then I will kill him anyway. But right now I need him and I need to show co-operation in this."

James' gaze was locked with his, glaring, furious, but something in her shifted. Her mouth was a compressed line of disgust and anger, but she nodded.

Before talking to James, Sark had decoded the rest of Irina's message. An emergency had blown up in L.A., the CIA had been forced to allow her access to its databases in the belief that she could rectify the situation for them. During her on-line stint she had secretly uncovered exactly what it was that she had turned herself in for: the location of the CIA's Rambaldi devices. She could now leave, but to do so she needed to tip the CIA's hand, she needed to push them into such a panic about Sloane that they would be willing to let her out, running her on a long leash in the hope that she could dig up Sloane for them. When she was out and running, Sark could extract her.

She needed Sark to engineer Sloane into raising his threat profile.

Well, if Sloane's possession of a re-usable neutron bomb in a suitcase didn't achieve that, Sark didn't know what the hell would.

James left to complete her work on the Rambaldi neutron bomb. Sark stayed with Sloane to hammer out negotiations. He was relieved at James' absence because there was a chance that Sloane might ask for something she could not go along with. Sark was painfully aware that he was now in a weak position. He needed Sloane – never a good place to be - and Sloane was newly aware that Sark was not his puppet.

_Great timing on your rebel streak Sarkey! _he glowered to himself.

"So, why do you need this device so suddenly?" he asked.

"Do I need to tell you?"

"No, but humour me. After all, I can still withhold it from you."

Sloane smiled, "I might equally ask why you are co-operating."

Sark knew that one had been coming and was ready for it.

"Because as you said, I enjoy power and control, and this endeavour has the feel of both." He prayed that Sloane would buy it. Sloane bought it – after all, Sark had been careful to give Sloane reference to what Sloane had just offered him: power and control. Sark knew Sloane wouldn't have offered those factors if Sloane hadn't already decided they were Sark's weaknesses. "So, to repeat myself Mr. Sloane, which I never enjoy doing, why do you particularly want it _now_?"

"I need it in a negotiation for a section of the Rambaldi manuscript - "

_Oh for fuck's sake!_

" - which of course, may not be a factor of prime concern to yourself. So in addition, I will negotiate for a financial exchange from my intended customer: 40 million dollars, of which half will immediately be yours."

Sark was grateful for the introduction of money into the equation, it gave him a concrete benefit behind which to hide his real reason for co-operation: Irina.

Sloane shifted slightly in his seat, poising himself for his next sentence. Sark picked up the tell. Whatever was coming next, Sloane saw it as a potential deal-breaker. Sark steeled himself to agree to it no matter what it was.

"For any exchange at all of course, my customer will require proof of the effectiveness of the weapon."

Sark kept his face utterly frozen.

"My customer has an ex-wife whom he considers to have betrayed him. He wants her … removed. A display of the weapon's capabilities which achieved that would, I believe, gain his gratitude as well as his money. And I need his gratitude."

Sark got the urge to make a sneering reference to the alternative of simply withholding alimony payments. However, whilst he, Sark, may have wanted to question what was being suggested, he knew that Mr. Sark, his public persona, would not. In order to maximise Irina's chances of escape, Sloane had to be convinced he was dealing with Mr. Sark, and with Mr. Sark's motives. Sark couldn't leave Irina locked up in that glass box forever.

Sloane squirmed again.

_Here comes another deal breaker._

"I feel sure that you and I are both aware that Dr. Dodgson isn't fully on board with this. So in order to minimise the possibility of sabotage on her part I would like you to be the one to 'press the button' so to speak. It will give you the maximum incentive to ensure her complete co-operation."

Sark felt his stomach roll, but responded with the question which he knew Mr. Sark would be expected to ask.

"When and where is the planned hit?"

The two men went on to discuss exact details of the strike. Sark could scarcely credit his ability to keep functioning. A hit on the Mexico City Vatican Embassy, with a church attached? Hundreds of people?

He and Sloane separated, with Sloane under discreet guard. They re-convened a few hours later to meet with James during her presentation of her findings. When all three of them re-assembled, Sloane was both pleased and impressed by James' work. He was also thrilled. Dodgson was brilliant. Dodgson really understood Rambaldi. Dodgson could build the all important _Telling_ which would pave the way for Rambaldi's return.

"Excellent my dear," he said. "I'm sure all is in order. In any case we shall see when we go for a trial run with the weapon."

James jerked a look at Sark.

"We're testing in the Siberian Wastes," he lied smoothly.

Looking at James, Sark did not see Sloane's eyes glint at his words. Hearing Sark, Sloane knew he had just won a prize. Sark had lied to Dodgson, and he'd lied to cover the enormity of what they were about. Sloane knew then that Sark had a further weakness – whether he knew it or not, whether he even liked it or not, Sark cared about what Dodgson thought of him.

And Dodgson, what did she think?

"I'm sure you'll be interested to hear, Dr Dodgson," Sloane interjected, "that Mr. Sark will be the one to detonate the device." He watched her intently. "I'm sure, however, that the calculations for its construction are all in order and that all will go smoothly."

Sark's gaze was riveted on Sloane, he didn't see James' reaction: James blinked too many times.

"Well I will need to run some last minute checks you understand," she said, a slight hitch in her voice. "I always like to triple check calculations."

Sloane smiled approvingly, "Of course you do my dear."

Sloane knew then that she had sabotaged the figures she had been about to hand him, intending to destroy the weapon on first use. He knew it because now he knew that she was going to fix them. Sloane congratulated himself. He not only had Sark's weakness, but now he had Dodgson's too.

Dodgson's weakness, whether she acknowledged it or not, whether she even _knew_ it or not, was Sark.

Sark and James faced each other after Sloane's departure. Sark's face was a poised mask: controlled, composed, decided. He intended for them to turn a corner based on their alliance against Sloane, he was going to _make_ it happen. "James, I - "

She cut him off, speaking rapidly, as though if she could just get the words out fast enough he would have to comply.

"I coughed up the data for that bomb and in return I want something: I want out, I want my freedom back. I'm gonna co-operate on this and you are gonna let me go. After that, _I never want to see your face again._"

It was a hiss that evinced utter conviction.

Sark blinked repeatedly. It might almost have been a fluttering of eyelashes, but it wasn't. Silence resonated between them. Then, just for a puzzled second, James caught her breath at something she thought she saw in his face – something flickering there before it was swiftly covered up.

Just for a second there had seemed to be a horrible vertiginous depth to his gaze, and at the bottom of it something lying broken and hurt from having taken an unexpected fall too-far.

_He's hurt? I hurt him? That can't be, he …_

"Oh puhleeze," she sneered at him, shoring herself up against her own thoughts, "cut the soulful 'I'm hurt' routine. _You haven't got 'hurt' in you, you bastard!"_

Five minutes later, Sark slid to a crouch on his bathroom floor, back to the closed door, 8000 suit-jacket rucked up by the friction between he and the door panels. The bathroom: he owned the entire suite and this small, locked cell was the only place in it he could even try to be himself. His knees were drawn up, elbows on them, fists pounding at his temples - trying to deal with a panicked, hysterical wrath he did not know how to express.

_It can't be true! It can't be! She can't not want me! _

He began to rock back and forth into the door, stronger and more wildly each time, eventually slamming against it.

_It can't be happening! Not to me!_

The heels of his handmade shoes started kicking against the floor.

He yanked frenziedly at his golden hair.

His whole body twisted and jerked, face contorted.

_IT CAN'T BE HAPPENING!_

Something contorted and flexed within him and Mr. Sark – the urbane, controlled, icily self-determined Mr. Sark - lost it.

He repeatedly threw his head back, slamming it into the door, silently screaming, his fists pulling at his hair.

His screaming was silent because it had to be. Not just through fear that anyone might hear but because somewhere along the way Mr. Sark had forgotten how to express a vulnerability. He'd forgotten how to make those kinds of screams.

Vulnerability was a danger and Mr. Sark had eliminated it a long time ago.

All he could do now was keep his hurts inside - like a toxin he couldn't purge - building up the level over the years until one day, presumably, the poison would kill him.


	25. Chapter 25

**Chapter 25: La Destreza** - _dexterity, skill, ability; the art and science of fighting._

Back in L.A. Jack was in his usual state of mind: suspicious.

What the hell was that boy Sark up to? And was Sydney involved in any way?

He didn't think for one second that his daughter had any active connection with the recent firebombing of the Vatican Embassy in Mexico City, even though she'd been there at the time of the neutron bomb going off. But she was his daughter and he'd more than picked up on her queasy distress during the firebombing briefing when Sark's involvement had been revealed. She had kept it well hidden, down to one blink and a swallow, but it had been there.

He had once darkly joked with himself that all Sark lacked from his resume was 'mass-murder'. Well, it looked like the boy had corrected that shortcoming.

_Looked_ like it.

Jack had gone to Irina.

He'd hit her straight out with the firebombing incident, looking for intel. Irina's face had given her away, she was utterly stunned.

"No." She was shaking her head – rejecting the information.

For the first time in his life Jack Bristow saw Irina Derevko in denial and knew that quite possibly it was the first time that she had ever _been_ in denial. He could quite clearly see that she had known nothing about it.

_Well, get out of the river, lady._

"Still think that bastard's good enough for my girl, Irina?"

"He wouldn't have – he – you don't know him!"

"Well patently neither do you."

Irina's face was a mask of horrified disbelief. "It must be Sloane behind it!" Her eyes cast about at nothing, her mouth seemed to slacken and lose it's shape. Jack had never seen her so shocked. She seemed to gather herself and then looked at him with a desperate directness. "How's Sydney?"

Now that he had Irina Derevko on the back foot Jack wasn't giving up, he shoved hard. "Do you mean 'how is Sydney taking the news that her boyfriend's a mass-murderer'?" A sly needle, "why do you ask Irina?" and then the sucker-punch, "have you been setting her up to fall for Sark?"

Irina rocked but rallied. "From inside here? You over-estimate even my abilities!"

He ignored her attempted deflection. "I'm going to ask you once," he snarled, "is there anything going on between my daughter and that bastard?"

"If there is," she snarled back, "then neither of them has ever told me!"

Truth.

Jack turned on his heel and left.

Irina slumped to her cot, her heart hammering, black stars bursting before her eyes, she felt almost as though she was about to pass out. She could hardly take in the enormity of what Sark had done. She had known from Sark's signals that he was arranging for some threat posture on Sloane's part - but this?

_My God – what's going on inside Sark's head?_

Jack sat in his office, it's glass front giving him a good view of the Rotunda. He could see Sydney moving round like a trauma victim on medication and saw Vaughn sitting at his carousel with that vaguely pained expression that passed for thoughtfulness on his part. With a sudden, resentful viciousness the strength of which surprised him, Jack thought that someone should tell Vaughn that the expression just made him look constipated.

Jack was suspicious because the Echelon interception on the firebomb was another piece of coincidence he just could not swallow. The second one in as many weeks, the first having been that nonsense with the Caplan hostage rescue. He thought about it. Two incidents in two weeks … and the common denominator was that machiavellian brat Sark.

An Echelon intercept just when one was really needed? And one from the precise target area of their current mission, letting them know where to evacuate? And the thing was a supposed communiqué between two terrorists? The level of co-incidence was laughable. In his experience, terrorists didn't discuss their K-Mart shopping lists without using code – they certainly wouldn't have an upfront conversation about an impending mission over an unprotected channel!

"Terrorists', 'weapons of mass destruction', 'Rambaldi'; there had been enough information in that short burst to have given an analyst multiple orgasms. It was an orgy of evidence, orgies of evidence did not exist. Especially in … Jack thought about it … in one way conversations. He had reviewed the intercept, there hadn't even been any evidence to suggest it had been a two-way communication, it had almost been as though someone were talking to themselves … using Echelon to deliberately flare out a distress signal.

Sark?

Whoever had sent that message must have been on the spot at the time – the CIA had only been able to effectively evacuate because they'd known where the message had come from. Sark was on the spot at the time. Jack was betting that he was the only one there who knew what was going to happen. The little pisher knew about Echelon, he'd actually tried to steal an Echelon unit once, he knew how the system worked. If you wanted to get a last minute warning out, then loud hailing Echelon by using as many trigger words as you could cram into a compressed run-time would do it for you.

They had since tracked the little swine to Kandahar: Jack wasn't entirely sure that wasn't deliberate on Sark's part too, letting them know where they could find that bomb.

Sydney was about to be prepped and sent after it.

Was that kid playing a double game against Arvin Sloane? If so, Jack wondered whether he dared voice his suspicions on it. Information-wise Jack knew that the CIA was a sieve, and if Sark was running a double game then the fewer who knew about it the better.

Now that Jack was actively considering Sark, he realised that he had done a lot of back-brain calculation on the boy, had formed opinions on him without ever consciously realising it. He'd accumulated whispers of back-door intel on the deception-orientated brat, dark hints about an effectively parentless childhood and of being subsumed into some government project. It chimed awkwardly with Jack as he was very uncomfortably aware of the U.S. authorities' Project Christmas. He had formed an opinion on Sark's morality, or the lack of it. He suspected that the boy had been raised in a moral vacuum, that he'd been denied any template of 'good' or 'bad' upon which to base himself. He wondered if that partly explained his attachment to Irina, and then his even more unpleasant-seeming attachment to Sloane – was he at some level seeking some parental figure who could provide guidance? After all, having been reared in a morality-free zone didn't mean that the boy was without any intrinsic moral fibre, but rather that he did not know how to direct it. Jack had a sudden image of Sark as a wildly spinning compass needle, trying desperately to lock on to the moral version of a proper magnetic alignment but unable to find one.

He wondered, if he were right and Sark had – within the confines of the crazed world he functioned in – been trying to do the right thing recently, then did that mean that he had found some human lode stone to be guided by?

Well, Sark had better be careful if he were pulling a double game because he was up against Arvin Sloane. Sark was young and in comparison to Arvin Sloane he was inexperienced. In a straight power play shoot-out between Sloane and Sark, Jack was uncomfortably aware that his money wasn't on the boy to win. To put up a good fight yes, but not to win.

Jack decided to keep his thoughts to himself on the possibility of Sark double-gaming, because if Sark was up to something against Arvin Sloane, then the brat would need all the stealth he could get.

Two days later the brat was using all the stealth he had.

After Mexico he had not gone back to Russia as the White Devil, instead he was now poised on a hillside above the Rambaldi bomb's current location – in the Kandahar compound of a warlord named Kabir, a man who did not believe in divorce.

He was about to do something drastic. He was determined to prove to James Dodgson that she was wrong: that he _could_ change.

Prior to leaving Russia he had locked James away under guard in a private Dacha, where Sloane could not find her in Sark's absence. She had been struggling, spitting, kicking with rage.

"_Stop treating me like a goddamn parcel!"_

He had not bothered to tell her that it was for her own good. Mr. Sark didn't do explanations. Instead, he glittered with a dark anger at her earlier rejection him. He had gathered himself together after his episode in the bathroom, refusing to depart from the only self he knew: Mr. Sark.

"_You're staying here until I get back." _

"_You can't treat me like this! I'm a person!"_

"_No, you're property! You're an asset."_

"_I'm going to hate you for this!"_

"_You hate me already, remember? You made very sure to tell me so when you wished I was dead!"_

He had phoned James after he had left Mexico, not giving details, explanations, excuses, but baldly stating that there would be a delay in his return. Snarling, she had spat that he'd better not be playing her.

He had half-laughed at her. _"If I am, what choice do you think you've got?"_

He flinched away from the memory, just thinking of her set off a seething anger in him, and right now he couldn't afford it. Right now he had to concentrate on the job in hand.

He had refused to think about Mexico and what he'd done there. He had suppressed the memory of it, because looking at it might kill him. He refused to engage in the game of shoulda, woulda, coulda. Whatever he should have, would have, could have, he hadn't. Instead he now focused and drove forward, morphing his hard anger into a concentration on his plan for fixing the mess.

Sark intended to blow the shit out of Kabir's compound and everything in it - bomb included - with air to ground missile strikes and daisy cutter drops. No fancy ground interception, no small assault troop incursion trickery, just complete erasure. With everything dead, he'd nip in to make utterly sure that the Rambaldi device was destroyed and then he'd leave. Sloane would never know what had really happened, and seeing how he already had his latest Rambaldi toy safely off the warlord – a segment of a Rambaldi page - he probably wouldn't care.

Sark had used three of the 20 million Sloane had transferred to him, following Sloane's sale of the firebomb, to engage an offshoot of the Russian air force as part of a mercenary manoeuvre.

The idea of destroying the warlord using the man's own money struck Sark as fitting.

He was in prone-position fifteen minutes before the night time air strike was due, camouflaged and kitted up with high calibre, long-range, sniper gear as much for viewing as for potential protection. He was the mission's ground spotter. He'd move back to a minimum safe distance in a few minutes.

A nice neat plan – not much to go wrong - until something did.

Viewing casually through his night vision sniper-scope, his body jumped slightly in his prone position at an explosion of activity in the compound. Two, no three figures, came lurching out amidst gunfire, carrying the bomb between them. One of them looked like they'd taken a long-time beat –

Sydney! 

Even before he'd trained his sights on her face he knew it was her. From half a mile out in the dark he could tell her just by the line of her body, by the fall of her hair.

Sydney Bristow. He'd know her anywhere.

What the fuck is going on down there? 

No time to think. Struggling to a half kneeling/half sitting position that broke his camouflage cover, he trained his sniper's rifle on the compound and began banging bullets into anything that moved that wasn't CIA. He wasn't greatly concerned with the two men accompanying Sydney who he thought were Dixon and … _that fucker Vaughn!_ He drilled two bullets into a running man to expel his wrath. His over-riding concern was to get Sydney to safety. He could see the truck she was headed for and covered her access to it. As far as he was concerned, the other two agents could take their chances.

His heart was thumping in his chest, his veins singing with adrenalin. Amidst the confusion of the gunfight his deadly covering fire went undetected.

The only time he thought he'd been noticed was when Sydney had wrenched open the passenger side door to the truck and had faced a gun barrel pointed at her from one of Kabir's men who had simultaneously opened the driver's door. Sark had put a bullet through the man's head and blown him to oblivion. For a split second Sydney had frozen as the trajectory of the bullet had made no sense to her, as both Dixon and Vaughn were behind her. Sark coldly and calculatedly slammed a bullet into the brick wall at her back, startling her past her confusion and shoving her into the truck.

The three agents, and the bomb, escaped in the vehicle.

Up on the hill, Sark got his wild, lurching heartbeat back under control. For a second he felt almost physically sick. He had to bend double, kneeling over, almost on all fours trying not to retch.

_Holy hell! Sydney was down there all along and I didn't even know!_ _Fifteen minutes later and she would have been dead!_

He was stunned. He'd always thought … it was stupid of him he knew, but he'd always imagined that he'd _know_ when Sydney was in the game – some extra sense had always told him in the past. When he'd first seen her at that Moscow factory, he _knew_ who she was. When they'd fought with latajangs, he'd _known_ it was her. Even when she had been playing the vamp in Paris he had known, even though he had let her think he hadn't.

He had never forgotten that time in Paris, when she'd cut loose and camped it up on the stage. She'd shown her true colours then, because she thought no-one would see that it was the real her doing it. Watching her, he had suddenly known that the only way she could be fully alive was when she was pretending to be someone else, because she was too scared to plainly be herself.

Was that when I started to care for her? 

He defiantly shook the thought out of his head. _I care _about_ her, not _for_ her! There's a big difference!_

Well, however he had known she was there before, he'd had no inkling tonight, not the remotest blip. It was as though some inner radar had been shaken out of line.

Sydney had been the one he had spotted as having taken a beating. She must have gone in a while ago, gotten captured and gotten tortured. He was betting that Dixon and Vaughn had come along much later to rescue her.

_Vaughn, that fucker! Suppose I ought to give him one inch of respect for coming for her._

But his aside about Vaughn was a distraction and he knew it. Truth was, she'd been down there and he hadn't known it. He faced up to the reality: he'd been about to kill her. His whole body tensed almost to locking point at the recognition. He wanted to scream. He was rigid with anger: anger at himself, anger at Sloane and his dealings with Kabir, anger at the whole situation which enmeshed him. Like wildly arcing lightning, his rage sought out an external target to earth itself upon, and found one.

_The stupid fucking CIA!_ Why hadn't they called in an air strike instead of sending in a lone agent? Why did they have to go for the complicated trick-shot over the obvious play every fucking time?

As he watched the truck safely depart, taking the bomb with it, he resentfully radioed to call off the imminent air strike, resentfully because he'd paid for it whether it happened or not. Besides, he would love to blow up Kabir's base, the bastard had it coming, but it wouldn't do though. It was counter-productive. The bomb had been retrieved already, blowing up the base with Russian jets would just tip his hand when right now the blame was squarely on the CIA and Kabir's own stupidity. It was time for him to leave. He turned to rise from his position, body unlocking from its anger-induced stiffness, his nausea conquered, and felt the razor edged knife of one of Kabir's long-range patrolmen at his throat.

He didn't even need to think. In one movement he gripped the man's wrist, snapped it, took the knife and gutted his opponent: in under the belly, up in a straight line and then out again. It took less than three seconds. He didn't even bother to look at the results as he casually dropped the man's own knife and stepped away into the dark, all anger spent.

The dark was quite happy to receive him. After all, in many ways Mr. Sark was one of its own.

The dying man slumped to the ground, his life flooding out of him. In the moonlight he had seen the stranger's pale hair and even paler skin. The silvery light had caught the trespasser's eyes as he had turned, rendering their irises to an almost inhuman, mirrored sheen.

The man died, having only time for one thought: _I've been killed by a White Devil …_

Sydney lay in the bath when she got home after Kandahar, gazing within herself, drained, beyond all tears. Vaughn crouched on the floor beside her, leaning against the side of the tub, trying to comfort her just by being there.

If only she could whole-heartedly love the man who was with her now, but she couldn't; she was grappling again with the presence of the monster under the bed, the wolf at the door: Sark.

She had tried to hold on to her rage against him – to use it as a shield against her feelings for him – but she couldn't. She kept mentally shouting at herself that he'd taped her having sex, that he'd been laughing at her; her mind kept shouting about the firebomb in Mexico, but her inner shouts kept turning to sobs. She couldn't hold her anger together. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make herself hate Sark.

She thought she was losing her mind.

All through her ordeal at Kabir's base one of the things that had kept her going was the utter conviction that Sark would come and get her. And how crazy was that? But she had held fast to it. She knew that Sloane was there, and so she had clung to the certainty that as Sloane were there then surely Sark must be there too. That Sark must know she were held captive and being put to torture, that he would finally snap and change sides and come and save her. Rationalising that Sark was near she had found herself focussing on him obsessively, almost as though sheer telepathy could bring him to her.

But then Sloane had left, and Sark had still not come … and at great personal risk Vaughn and Dixon had.

How could she not love Vaughn after all he'd done for her? What kept her clinging on to the possibility that Sark might be human, even after all the things he _had_ done to her?

He was a murderer, a liar, he had betrayed her personally, the only reason he wasn't a _convicted _killer was that no government had ever caught up with him. He was _the enemy_. Why couldn't she just give up on him? Why couldn't she commit to Vaughn, who was tired, battered, worn, but despite everyone's vague, dark suspicions about she and Sark, had still risked his life to come and save her?

Just how far down did Sark have to sink before she could let him go?

She didn't even really know him. A man who had mass-murdered his way through a church congregation? A man who had bugged her home while she had sex and had no doubt been callously laughing at her? How far down into some black, icy sea was she prepared to let him drag her until the evidence finally forced her to give up her grip on him, to give up the conviction that he was capable of … redemption?

Giving up on Sark. She knew she should, she knew she must, but almost with a self-hate, she knew she hadn't done it yet.

All the terrible things he'd done, to her and to others and at times even to himself, and yet she still could not hate him.

She wanted to weep in frustration and grief. What was _wrong_ with her that she still held on?

Thinking of his crimes, she spoke, almost talking to herself. "Every time we think we've seen the worst, and it's never over … "

_Author's note_: and yup, the interpretation of Sydney's motivation for that last line of dialogue is sheer fanwank. And do I care? No!


	26. Chapter 26

**Chapter 26: Stesso Tempo** - _to parry and riposte in one action, often a deflecting counter-attack. _

Jack was a man as little given to acknowledging his emotions as Sark, but he had to acknowledge one now, because it wasn't giving up on him until he did: he felt small.

He had treated Irina badly – projecting the fear and uncertainty he had over Sydney's potential involvement with Sark onto Irina herself, and now he felt … Jack had so little engagement with his emotions these days that he'd forgotten their names, all he knew now was that he felt _bad_.

He had gone to see Irina. Following the firebombing and Kandahar incident he knew, as did everyone else, that if anyone had a good guess as to anything Sloane and Rambaldi related, then it was her.

Staring at her, he wondered if she could tell that he was sorry. Staring at him, she wondered if he could tell that she was desperate, because if Sark's Mexico City enormity were not enough to tip the CIA's hand into letting her out, then she did not want to imagine what worse crime Sark might have to commit.

He had already hocked his soul enough.

As Jack and Irina's conversation progressed, he intent on intel, she intent on an out, the old magic between them kicked in again and at the end they were finishing each other's sentences. It was agreed, Irina would be let out to run and bring in Sloane.

Sark sprang Irina during the 'meeting' with Sloane in Panama City. Irina had co-operated in letting Jack implant a tracker chip in her, Sark had immediately excised it on her extraction, casting it into a decoy vehicle so it could act to draw off the CIA. Satellite surveillance had been wiped out by Allison Doren who had exploited Will Tippin's CIA access, as Sark had planned that she would.

The few minutes Sark and Irina had alone, between eluding the CIA and Sloane's arrival, had not seen the reunion between them that, until recently, each had imagined. Knowing of the Mexico City firebombing, Irina looked at Sark and wondered how well she really knew him. In turn, Sark looked at Irina and wondered at how much longer he would continue to know her.

He had come to a decision: he needed to get his life back.

He knew it.

Him being the 'bad guy' had nearly gotten Sydney killed in Kandahar. He couldn't risk that happening twice.

Him being the 'bad guy' had seen him sink to the level of a kiddie-snatching, congregation-killer. He knew he could not afford to let himself sink any further, if he sank any further down he'd be crushed to death under the deep-sea pressures.

Sark had uncomfortably faced up to one core truth: his life wasn't going the way he wanted it, and to change that he would have to break with Irina.

The plane journey away from Panama - with Sark, Irina and Sloane in a private jet - went like a bad family outing, with 'Mom' and 'Dad' at each other and their child told to leave the room. After she'd then blown up at Sloane and the man had retired to his private cabin, Irina had requested Sark's return. A bug-beater was in operation beside her, buying them refuge against any surveillance by Sloane. Sark saw it the moment he sat down across the central aisle from her, and he knew from its presence that she intended to attempt a re-kindling of their previous closeness.

Like water pressing against a dam wall and then breaking through it, he felt a panic lash out within him. He couldn't afford to go back to Irina!

All his suppressed memories of Mexico spurted out at him like high-pressure jets through the wall of his self-control.

_I KILLED 62 PEOPLE! - I BURNT THEM TO DEATH!_ _OH MY GOD, I BURNT THEM TO DEATH!_

He felt like a sleepwalker who abruptly awakes from a nightmare, only to find that the nightmare is real.

JAMES! – SHE'LL FIND OUT! - WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WHEN SHE FINDS OUT? 

His vision spotted and darkened, his breath shortened, his heart pounded, he was going to pass out. He was going to go into some dark space, and he might never get back. A detached part of him wondered if he were about to go completely mad. And then he didn't go. Instead he held on. Gripping hard to the last shreds of his sense of self, he seemed to straighten out of it. His vision cleared, dark spots disappearing, that rushing sound in his ears dissipating, his heartbeat settling back to a normal rate.

He had nearly toppled over some terrible edge into some place from which there was no return, but he had clawed his way upright, even though he didn't know quite how. All he knew … was that he must never, _never_, lose it like that again.

If he did that again, he might be lost forever.

Dry mouthed, he conquered the urge to faint and vomit as he faced up to the terrible technicolour memories of what he'd done in Mexico.

He saw Irina looking at him, her brows drawn together, head angled, concerned.

He stiffened, alarmed that in his near collapse he had shown a vulnerability that she would exploit. Because now he knew one thing for sure, he knew that after Mexico he couldn't afford to work for Irina any longer, not if he wanted to keep even a finger-tip grip on the tattered remnant of his humanity. He was going to break with Irina because he was going to _have_ to. But even as he sat there he knew that she was going to pull on every last thread that had ever bound him to her in an effort to keep him.

To resist her he would need a very heavy defence – so he steeled himself and got one. For the first time in many years he forced himself to dredge up one of the worst memories of his entire life as connected with Irina: the first time he had ever tortured a woman. It hadn't been the last time, but it had been the worst time, because it turned out he'd been torturing her for secrets she did not have.

He had been fourteen at the time.

He approached the memory as one would a sealed radiation unit, opening it gingerly and then walking quietly in, knowing he was going into Hell.

How old had the woman been? He guessed about, what, 28? He rolled it all out before him, everything he had done to her. It had been so hideous, so horrible, that at the end he'd killed her out of mercy. And also out of cowardice. He could not live knowing she would have to in the state in which he had left her.

He had been told by Irina's lackeys that the woman was a deadly enemy, skilled in deception so he shouldn't believe her pleas of innocence, she was party to plan to torture and kill Irina, that Irina was being held somewhere being tortured even now, and that the woman knew where she was. The woman hadn't been any of that, it turned out shortly afterward she had been a complete civilian.

He hadn't spoken for a week after it happened, just stayed in bed, curled on his side, staring blankly at the wall.

Irina had turned up, mysteriously unhurt, several days after the woman's death, giving a fine show of tear-stained fury when she heard what had happened to the woman and thus of what had happened to Sark.

_Yes, very convincing Irina, but how odd that you were just that little too late._

For the first time in his life he faced the worst part of his memory, the dark suspicion that despite her show of scalding tears and grief, that Irina had in fact set the whole thing up. The woman had not known the answers, had not even understood the questions, so she could not 'break' even though she wanted to. Had that been Irina's way of arranging it so that he would have to keep inflicting pain no matter what? So he could not quit because the answers that would let him stop could never come, because they were never there to begin with?

Sitting in the plane, he viewed the logical supposition that Irina had arranged the incident to destroy the last of his humanity and recreate him as some heartless machine suited to protect her. He decided on the grounds of probability that it was true.

She'd been party to essentially killing him when he was four years old, she'd done it again when he was fourteen. He'd died twice and each time had come back as a slightly more hollowed echo of what he had been before. How many more times could he die inside and still come back as someone even faintly recognisable as himself? Not many more, he knew it. He'd just died again in Mexico, he was running out of lives.

From his seat opposite her he regarded her. He decided that he could deal with her now, because he had to.

"How was Sydney when you last met her?"

Irina's question was so incongruous that Sark almost blinked. But then incongruous was what she did best wasn't it? – setting you up for the sucker punch. He replied to her query, keeping his voice as even as possible.

"She was tolerably well when I saw her last." Even voiced? - he'd thrashed the ass off 'even'. With his clipped sentence structure and his proper pronunciation he'd managed to sound like the drawling hero of an Oscar Wilde comedy.

"Oh really, when was that?"

"Switzerland," he lied, hiding the business in Kandahar and the quick-step over the Echelon call in Mexico - no point in telling her anything she didn't need to know, she already had enough on him as it was, "when she failed to prevent the theft of the Magnetometer."

Irina smiled with an almost familial affection, and then came her sucker punch. "She failed to stop you firebombing a church too I hear."

Sark felt a shock akin to being plunged into ice-cold water and defensively clung to one thing: the certainty that Irina had just made a tactical error. She had lead with her strongest card, it must have been her strongest card, right? - because surely there was no worse? Recovering, solidifying, he took courage from it, because now he had survived her worst attack, he knew that whatever else she had left was something he could also withstand.

That which does not destroy me … just hurts like hell. Staggering to his psychological feet, instead of 'broken' he felt something else instead, something very cold slowly arising within him, something so strange it took time for him to identify … he felt a contempt for Irina Derevko. Even as he struggled to accommodate to the sheer unbelievability of it, his voice had moved on, instinctively counter-attacking because he knew he must. His next words were a chill wind biting across some Arctic wasteland. 

"You know perfectly well I had to do that thing in Mexico City for you," – '_that thing', I still can't even bear to say what it was, can I? _ "After you'd wilfully chosen to hand yourself over to the CIA." Irina's gaze widened in surprise, but those words were as nothing to the next. "Irina, don't ever set yourself up in judgement upon me again." He was stunned at his unhurried tone. It was as though he'd rehearsed this speech all his life – ever since aged 4 - but had only just delivered it. "After all, in Shelley's _Frankenstein_ Irina, Frankenstein isn't the name of the monster, it's the name of the doctor who created him."

Sark was almost stunned with disbelief at what he was saying, his mind a tumble of confusion and, he admitted it, some fear. Not just fear of what Irina might immediately do, but a much greater fear - fear of the whole unknown which now lay before him. He had just severed a connection with Irina and taken the frightening first steps into his own future where he would have to be the master of his own destiny and not the servant of someone else's. He had just left the last of his childhood behind.

The part of Irina's mind that was still working wasn't sure whether Sark's words had been a declaration of war or of independence. She looked at him wide eyed. To her, his handsome face portrayed only conviction and certainty, she saw nothing of the inner fear and confusion, the grief and the guilt. She had schooled him so well in hiding his emotions that now even she couldn't see them.

Instead, an alarm went off within her - she was losing Sark!

How could she keep him? She instinctively fell back upon her traditional method for gaining what she wanted – trading information. She began to deal.

"Sark, I know that things have been strained between us, by an enforced distance if nothing else, but we can fix that. I have things to tell you, things about yourself."

As an alarm had gone off in Irina, one now went off in the confused and reeling Sark. He did not want to hear what she had to say, he'd made his break for freedom and now he had to keep running to make sure he got away. "I'm not interested."

His words were another stunning blow to Irina. In return she ignored her own panic, refusing to quite acknowledge just how rejecting of her he was. Instead, of the information she had at her disposal about Sark, she chose to lead with her least revealing card, in case it was enough and she subsequently did not have to deal out more.

"Sark, you are a Romanov."

"A what?" Sark was so puzzled by her statement that he actually spoke when he had intended to remain silent.

"You are a descendent of the great Russian royal line."

Sark was side-swiped by a flurry of memories and instincts, chief among them of how the rooms at their palace safe-house suited him and of how Irina had always been so slyly amused to see him there. That last memory was enough to tell him she was, astoundingly, speaking the truth now. She had been so amused because she had always known who he was. He gave a jerk of laughter and was stunned to find that incipient hysteria could actually sound quite dismissive. "Really? I'm a Romanov you say? How quaintly Ruritanian."

Irina knew she needed to play a stronger hand.

"Your father is Andrei Lazarey."

Two weeks ago Sark would have given almost anything to know that; well in the meantime too much had happened and he almost didn't care, he didn't have the space for it in his head. He couldn't _afford_ to care. "Never heard of him," came his response.

He didn't care? Irina felt she'd been chopped off at the knees. She played her final card. "You are part of the Rambaldi Prophesies."

_Oh for God's sake! _

The thought exploded inside Sark's head as he wondered if being on a plane was like being on a train, was there some 'stop-handle' he could pull and then just jump out? His voice spat at her. "Irina, I don't think you've ever noticed this, but out of the six billion people on this planet, with the exception of maybe 500, nobody cares about Rambaldi. And shall I tell you something surprising? For once, I'm with the majority."

What she had intended to use to bind him to her was the thing which had finally snapped the thread between them. Irina felt her solid certainties with Sark sliding away from beneath her – she was losing him and she couldn't afford to. Not now.

"You are prophesied."

Sark snapped. "Oh for God's sake, you really don't think I'm going to believe that do you?"

"You are part of an unusual family Sark - "

"You can talk."

" – one that has carried on down the generations - "

"Every family has carried on down the generations Irina – that's how we all got here - all six billion of us."

" – that was designed to culminate in you."

Sark felt as though he had been slapped. What? What had she said? Designed? Culminated? _Designed?_ Did that mean he wasn't real? That he was a _creation_? Just some prophesied _thing_? Feeling the sands of certainty being sucked away from beneath him he knew that Irina hadn't lead with her strongest attack after all, she'd kept the worst back, she'd kept this one. He fought against her horrifying implication – that he was just a pre-planned flight plan and could do nothing to affect it - with everything in him.

_I am not someone's creature! It's not true! I KNOW WHO I AM!_

"Me? I was the best they could do?" Sark forced himself to laugh out loud. "Someone should be asking for their money back!"

Irina leapt at him: half trained assassin, half angry mother figure who won't be cheeked by her child, only for the palm of Sark's hand to slam into her sternum, the energy of his blow sending her flying backwards so that she landed in an ungainly sprawl in the same chair from which she had sprung.

For the first time in their lives they had fought seriously - and he had won.

Sark fought down another flood of panic. He was fighting with _Irina?_ She was almost his _mother!_ He felt another stumble of confusion inside his head, but then … came to. He had to. If he were to survive this he had to cling to his self-determination.

_He wasn't some pre-planned automaton! He wasn't! No matter what anyone thought or wanted! He belonged to no-one but himself!_

"You've been in a cell for months Irina. I've been out in the field all that time, considerably adding to my body count in case you hadn't noticed – oh but there I'm wrong aren't I, because of course you had noticed." He looked at her quite calmly, irrespective of whether he felt calm.

He executed their relationship.

"I extracted you from the CIA and that calls us quits Irina. Let's not part enemies shall we?" The traditional ending to the sentence reverberated in his head, _not after all we've been to each other, _but he finished it the way he wanted to: "not after all we've put each other through."

Irina was staggered. Sark was rejecting her? This was Sloane's doing!

_Oh my God – I can't afford to lose him, not now and not to Sloane of all people!_

She thought of all that was at stake – but what could she do? And then a small internal voice told her: _you could tell him the truth_. She looked at Sark as he sat across from her, taller than she, broader, no longer that physically slight boy she had known for so long, had nurtured for so long: he was almost a man now. He was defensive, coldly angry at her, yes - but a man. She decided it was time to tell. Sark had to know what she did, and then they would see if he would walk away!

"Who do you think Rambaldi was?"

"A mad bastard the Vatican was right to have offed. I've got to hand it to those crazy Catholics, the Inquisition managed to get something right."

"The Church didn't manage to kill him."

"Yes they did Irina. Elvis left the building over 500 years ago."

"Sark, how do you think he arranged all this?"

"He didn't arrange anything. He died hundreds of years ago. So he left behind the blueprints for some impressively nasty boy's toys? So what? None of it matters now."

"He's coming back."

Sark managed not to laugh out loud – _Christ did these Rambaldi freaks ever give up? _ "And how do you know that Irina? Did he phone you up and tell you? Get your number from the International Felons-R-Us directory?"

Irina was astounded, how could anyone so enmeshed in the Prophesies as he be so laughingly dismissive of them? Who did he remind her of? He reminded her … he reminded her of Sydney, that's who!

Sark carried on. "Irina, I've got better things to do with my life than chase after old scraps of paper with some mad bastard's old doodles on them."

"You know, I'm almost proud of your attitude."

"So you should be, I'm a chip off the old butcher's block."

"You won't get to really leave you know, it's your destiny to be involved."

Destiny? Sark told himself that there was no such thing as destiny; he would _make_ his own fate. "Irina, I know you really love me, but trust me, even the most devoted sons have to leave home eventually. It's time to cut the apron strings Mummy."

His mockery stung her.

"Well, if you feel you ought to go, you should go." She could hear her voice spiral upwards but couldn't control it - she had come so far, done so much, and now Sark was _deserting_ her? "Go, go on, leave, - "

"What, right now?" Sark laughingly indicated the plane about them.

" – Go! And leave Sydney to fight on alone when you should have been at her side helping her!"

Sydney.

Sark felt that internal radar. Since Kandahar those sixth, seventh and eighth senses he had about Sydney were back and fully functioning. Abruptly alert, suddenly aware, he realised with a lurch of sick disbelief that he now regarded Irina as a danger to Sydney – _her own mother!_

"What about Sydney?" His voice sounded like a sword being drawn.

"She's Page 47 - "

Sark laughed dismissively, "according to some."

" – and you are Page 48."

There was a silence.

Sark's mind flared within him, shock versus determination to resist. Determination to resist won. How could it not? - there was no alternative for him.

_That does it, this has gone far enough!_ Irina was that intent on keeping him by her side that she was prepared to tell any lie, however crazy? Prepared to drag him down into her life-sucking Rambaldi obsession? Sark registered it as meaning one thing, that she would never let him go. He made up his mind. He would never be able to break with Irina, she wouldn't let him. He came to a conclusion, he wouldn't even try to break with her, he'd kill her instead.

He would kill her, and then slot Sloane too and make it look as though Sloane had killed Irina. James – he flinched at even her name, at that grinding anger that even thinking about her set off in him – well if he ever told James she would just have to understand it as self-defence and deal with it. As for Sydney … well, he would make damn sure that Sydney never had cause to find out.

He was going to kill Irina when he got off the plane.

In fact, maybe he wouldn't wait that long? Maybe he'd do it now? Kill Sloane and the aircrew too, take over the jet, change the flight plan, avoid any 'welcoming party' either Sloane or Irina might have waiting on arrival, and fly it to an unknown destination of his choice. Easy.

In the run up, all he had to do was to keep Irina on the back foot and softened up.

"Irina, I know what Page 48 is, I've seen it, it's some drivel about the human liver."

"That was a fake of mine, but I'll forgive you for considering my best efforts as drivel. I hid the real page for your safety. The U.S Government imprisoned Sydney for her prophesy involvement, they will simply kill you."

Sark couldn't decide if her statement was meant as emotional blackmail over the care she'd taken to protect him, or as an oblique threat on his life with the implication that she could expose him. Irina being Irina, he decided it was probably both.

Irina spoke on, evincing no awareness of his calculations. "According to Rambaldi," she continued, her voice low, smoky, cutting across his thoughts, "you are _The White Devil_."

Sark's mind stopped.

_She's bluffing. She knows about Moscow, that's all. This is all just one big lie!_

Irina pick up the tell of his pause, her eyes narrowing, head to one side. He'd learned not to trust her when she did that. "What does that title mean to you?" she enquired, "I can tell it means something."

_It means you're a lying bitch!_

He mentally ran through all the weapons he had on him and alighted upon the comfortable heft of a knife holstered against his inner left ankle. As quick to draw as a gun and no danger of it puncturing the fuselage. He wondered if he could fling it into her throat before she could move. He intended to try.

"What does it mean to me? Well, seeing as it's part of a Rambaldi Prophesy," he drawled, "it means about as much to me as the long range weather forecast – it means nothing. If it says 'sunshine', I'm still taking my umbrella." He casually shifted so that he sat with his left ankle propped across his right knee, his left arm trailing along the back of the bench seat next to him, his right hand dangling limply across the supported ankle. He looked almost languid, projecting a bored disinterest.

The fingers of his right hand were now only inches from that knife.

Having committed to his course of action, he did not allow himself to reconsider. He knew that if he did, he'd back down, with all that she had ever meant to him re-asserting itself. He got a grip on himself. She had to die. He drove himself toward that one aim and remembered a brief line from a childhood tale:_ off with her head!_

"I'm someone called the White Devil?" he shrugged indifferently, hoping to Christ that his voice sounded as indolent as he meant it to, "it's meaningless Irina. It's the same with all the Rambaldi prophesies, they inherently mean nothing. People project meaning upon them, _after the fact_. It's like the horoscopes in the Abby Someone column, whatever kind of day you've had, I'm sure you can always make the prediction fit."

He moved his hand another inch toward the knife.

"So that is what the prophesies mean to you? Nothing?" Irina looked at Sark as though measuring up a jump. "Very well, I will tell you what they mean to me."

She took the jump, she told him.

Minutes later, Sark stared across the aisle at her with his mind reeling from the input of so much unwanted knowledge, his psyche rejecting the horrifying picture she'd painted of just what the whole world would be like if Rambaldi's prophesied return came to pass - like Nazi Europe but without the fun parts. His gaze at her was something which would have lazered paint off a wall: so threatening because he felt so threatened.

"And why are you so sure of all that Irina?"

"Oh I don't know. Bad dreams, maybe? I just know. Like I know that as of ten minutes ago you decided to kill me with that knife you have on your left ankle."

Sark felt a small detonation in his chest. _Fucking hell!_

Irina may have lost her ability to read his emotions, but she had not lost her survival instinct. "I know you Sark. When you're sitting there, oh so casual, oh so relaxed, almost sprawling – that is when you are at your worst."

"Really? And I thought I looked such a nice boy too."

In an action so quick that she couldn't have stopped him if she had tried, he threw the knife.

It was three seconds before Irina realised that she wasn't dead, wasn't even cut. The knife had lodged exactly where Sark had hurled it, in the top of the side table upon which she rested one of her hands. It had landed blade first, embedding itself into the expensive veneer only two inches from her fingers.

He had launched after it before she could collect herself, wrenching it up out of the wood as his eyes locked with hers, only to slam it blade down into the table again, this time one inch from her hand. His free hand pinned her to her chair by her throat.

Irina involuntarily shuddered.

He spat his words at her. "Irina, why should I trust a thing you say? After all, you were once party to putting a four year old boy to death; don't lie, I was there when you did it." She flinched in shocked disbelief – what was he talking about? Sark saw her puzzlement and it enraged him – she didn't even know what she had done? All the years of being with her and she knew him so little? Rage ripped out of him. "It was me Irina, you killed _me_!" His voice rose to a shout, any louder and it wouldn't matter if they had a bug-beater in play, Sloane would hear anyway.

He still held her by the throat though he had no need, she was helplessly pinned by his furious gaze. Irina stilled under the sudden revelation of all that he thought she had done to him. Well, wasn't he right? What could she say? There was no justification for the things she had done, no possible apology she could ever give – not to Sark, not to one who did not believe the prophesies even though he was very much part of them. She went on instinct, the words out of her mouth before she had even thought them through.

"You ask me why you should trust me? Well you shouldn't. I can't _be_ trusted. But as far as the prophesies are concerned, you should _believe_ me, because I'm telling you the truth!"

She and Sark stared at each other, mere inches apart, neither of them blinking. Irina knew that if he didn't kill her within the next five seconds then he wasn't going to.

He didn't kill her.

Instead he flung himself back into his seat, ripping the knife up out of the table top and taking it with him, glaring at her furiously. Shades of an almost adolescent anger burned off him, a remnant of the juvenile life he had not allowed himself to have. He sat across from her, legs straight out before him, crossed at the ankles, arms folded tight across his chest, glaring at her from under his brows. Although he was now fully a man, it was one of the few times Irina had ever seen him really look like a boy.

"So let me get this straight," he spat, "Rambaldi's coming back. And when he gets here he'll be armed with super-weapons no one will be able to stand against, and then he'll turn the planet into his own personal fiefdom. That if Rambaldi isn't stopped then the whole world becomes one large death camp, with everybody in it?" He flicked her an acidic look which, for a moment, reminded her breath-takingly of Jack. "Why Irina? Why would anyone do that?" Sark reminded himself he was supposed to be impenetrably cynical and added, "_if_, that is, he's found some way to return from the dead and this isn't just more Rambaldi bullshit."

Irina verbally got off the back-foot and came at him.

"You ask why would he do that? Look at history and ask instead why he would not! Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, they committed insane atrocities upon the hundreds of millions under their sway for no reason other than they could. Why won't Rambaldi do the same? He'll consider himself a god, he'll have conquered death itself. He won't see himself bound by normality."

She felt herself almost blister under his disbelieving resentment but detected something flickering beneath his expression, his unwanted recognition that, at least on the argument of motive, her logic held good. She pressed her point. "Sark, it's one of your own sayings: 'You know when a petty dictator needs killing - they start naming days of the week after themselves'. You've met enough insane tyrants to know that they don't fuel up on logic. Don't look for logic in Rambaldi's motives."

"Irina I don't look for logic in his motives because he doesn't have motives; this is mindless superstition, he's not coming back!"

"He is."

Sark closed his eyes for a second –_ this is like dealing with a two year old!_

"Okay," he said, grinding out the words, humouring her, "assuming that he were actually coming back, how do you know it will end that way?"

"Because he said so in the last pages of his own manuscript."

"Oh, for God's sake! What? Quite openly? Wasn't that rather remiss of him?"

"Not if you consider it as advertising." She held his gaze. "Come on Sark, answer me: why would he advertise?"

Glaring at her, Sark was the very picture of defensive irritation. Irina knew, however, that his gimlet-keen mind would be working. He answered her - annoyed, indignant, resentful of even having to - but he answered her.

"Because where there's a bad guy, there's always somebody who wants to be his side-kick. Where there's a schoolyard bully, there are always those who'll line up with him rather than against him - those who'd rather share the spoils than be them."

"Quite."

Irina's face was aglow with an almost maternal pride at his analytical mind. Sark thought it was just her crazy Rambaldi streak coming out again. Irina continued, pressing her point.

"There will be no escape Sark. Destruction and death and horror and fear, they will be everywhere for everyone. And Rambaldi's henchmen, his signed-up minions, they'll hunt you down until they find you. He knows who you are, he knows what you look like, you're picture's on the page. Plastic surgery? It won't help, because he's even got your DNA code there too. You won't be able to run."

"What about the CIA? They'll stop him." _What had he just said? - the CIA! They couldn't stop traffic with a stop-light! And he was responding like he actually bought it? - I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this!_

"The CIA is corrupt. As an organisation the CIA will line up with him. All those organisations – those whose raison d'etre is power – they will all line up with Rambaldi. Oh, there will be pockets of resistance within them, people like Jack, but they will be overcome and destroyed." Irina saw Sark unconsciously stroke his finger across his lower lip as he focussed internally. She pushed on. "Why do you think the CIA have never destroyed any of the artefacts they have captured? They want to use them as much as the next power-seeker does!"

His gaze flicked back to her. "So why haven't you destroyed yours Irina? Same reason?"

She almost took pleasure in his quickness of attack.

"I haven't destroyed them because I don't have any."

Sark blinked.

"Sloane has 24 artefacts, the CIA has 23. I just had _knowledge_."

"Rather careless of you. A bit like a stamp collector who never quite got round to collecting any stamps."

Irina's mind shot off at a tangent and her eyes narrowed in an almost maternal exasperation. "Have you ever been told that you can be very annoying?"

"Frequently."

Irina ignored him and got back on the issue. "The only real way to stop Rambaldi is to not let him start."

She saw the expression on Sark's face lose its calculating edge and she knew he had come to a conclusion.

"Irina, Rambaldi was a genius, centuries ahead of his time, but these prophesies - they're fairy stories. No one can predict the future Irina, and they can't determine it either. If anyone were to even try, then tiny fluctuations in random events down the centuries would disrupt any fine-tuned outcome so it became something quite different from what was intended, it's called the Butterfly Effect. What you're saying – someone determining the future from the past - it just can't be done."

"I never said Rambaldi had determined or even predicted the future Sark, instead I think he _saw_ it. There's a big difference. I don't think he predicted the future, but that he simply watched it happen like a movie showing on a giant screen and then he _described_ it."

Sark's eyes narrowed. Well, he thought, if you were going to buy into six flavours of crazy, then that explanation was a lot less nuts than some spiritual, mumbo-jumbo, prophesy bollocks.

Irina carried on speaking. "I think that a lot of his inventions were things he simply stole from the future, where he saw them being created. Yes he was a genius, but one 'standing on the shoulders - "

" - of giants' ." Sark finished the Sir Isaac Newton quote for her. "So, he wasn't a genius so much as the biggest plagiarist who ever lived? Oh dear, Mr. Sloane will be upset."

"Sark, I know you still don't really believe me, but think about it. All his inventions, the cell-phone, his understanding of genetic code, of DNA, nuclear submarines, these are all things we have now. Things seem to be coming to a focal point now. All the key players are here now, all the inventions are things we can readily understand because we're nearly there anyway." She looked up. "He can see events as they happen now."

_The key players_, the words set off a dark chime in Sark's head.

"What's it got to do with Sydney?"

Irina looked at him and wondered why he had not instead asked - _what's it got to do with me? _Then she realised why. In all of this Rambaldi mess Sark would instinctively put her daughter's safety first. She felt a tremendous lurch of love for him because of it.

"I think he wants to come back, and he wants to do it physically. I think he's using some device mankind invented in our future to somehow bring his consciousness back into a physical entity. I think he needs Sydney to do it. Maybe genetically, he knows she is somehow suitable."

Sark gave a bark of laughter. "What, he's going to occupy Sydney? He's going to have a hell of a time trying to fit into a size eight frock!"

Irina gave a dry, uncomfortable half laugh. "No, I think he wants to breed a child by her, one he can … utilise."

"What?" Sark's word was an explosion in the small space. "He's going to use her to procreate someone he'll use as a shell? What's going to happen to the poor kid?" His disgust echoed around the cabin. He stopped and looked at Irina with a dawning horror. "Oh don't tell me I'm the other half of his baby-making deal? What are we, two pedigree dogs put together to make 'a litter of lovely puppies'?"

Irina held up a staying hand.

"I don't know what your role is," she staved off a wave of his disbelieving anger, "I didn't have time to properly read your page. I don't really know what you are in this."

Sark stared hard at her, his jaw shifting. He told himself that he didn't believe a word of it, _wouldn't_ believe a word of it, but … there was a page on him. Maybe Rambaldi – whoever - knew things about him? He swallowed hard, looking down at his folded arms, "Irina … have you ever thought … have you ever thought that maybe I'm the bad guy?" He kept staring at his folded arms, unable to look up at her.

"What?"

"That maybe I have a page as a warning and not as some kind of help?"

Irina stared at him until he felt compelled to look up at her. "Sark, I've known you since you were four years old; believe me, you are not the bad guy."

Sark held Irina's gaze. Some lump in his throat hurt, he tried to make his swallow of it imperceptible. He wished she had told him that years ago, but she hadn't and it was too late now. She continued.

"Just promise me one thing - "

"I won't promise you anything." He suddenly sounded painfully young.

"Just one thing," she persisted, "for anything good I might ever have given you." She sounded suddenly desperate. "Look, I know you've rejected me, but promise me this - that you won't go to Sloane. That you aren't aligning with Sloane now. Sloane is just like the CIA, he wants Rambaldi back so that he can be one of his all-powerful lieutenants."

Sark's amazed look told her that whoever had wrested him from her influence, it was certainly not Sloane. _But then … if it's not Sloane, who is it? Some new Khasineau? _

She enquired about what was preoccupying her.

"Why have you suddenly rejected me?"

There was a silence and then, in deference to all the years they'd spent together, Sark paid her the respect of answering. "You've had possession of my life for over 16 years." He looked up at her. "Now I want it back."

"Is there someone new?" Irina saw the shutters slam down behind Sark's eyes. Was there someone? He didn't trust her to know – well, maybe he was right not to. _Was it Sydney?_ "Are you going to try and kill me now?" she asked.

"No."

She believed him. "Will you continue to be my ally?"

"I won't work for you if that's what you mean."

Irina was very careful to note that he had not said 'no'. She probed further, onto the important point: was Sark's preoccupation with her own daughter? "What about Sydney?" The shutters stayed down, not a flicker, it told her nothing. "Will you help Sydney?"

Sark looked down, almost as though he were looking inside of himself, and then looked up again. He sounded almost puzzled, either puzzled at what he had found within or perhaps only puzzled that she should have asked. "I have always tried to help Sydney."

It was true, and it was enough for Irina, for now. However, she pushed slightly, wanting to use this new-found emotional core within him as leverage to tip him squarely back in to the game.

"If you do not stop Rambaldi, then you, and anyone you care about, will never be safe." _And anyone you care about_. She hoped that her words would resonate within him. She was struck by a sudden thought. "You're going to kill Sloane aren't you?"

"Well it's certainly on my 'to do' list."

"Don't. Not yet. Not until I can his get his collection of artefacts off him, I can't let anyone else have them. After that …"

He shrugged. "After that there'll be one less potential Rambaldi lieutenant in the world."

"There's one more thing I want."

Sark laughed. "Irina, there's always one more thing you want. Remind me never to go shopping with you if I'm picking up the bill."

"There's a DNA database in Stuttgart. I need it to locate the man carrying the Rambaldi Heart." Sark knew what she was talking about, she had briefed him on it. "Besides … for all we know, that database may be one of the things Rambaldi is using in our present, and his future, to track you and Sydney. Will you help me?"

Rambaldi again. Was there any getting away from it?

"Irina, do you really believe that Rambaldi nonsense?"

"He drew both your and Sydney's faces six hundred years ago. With your DNA codes. Yes, I believe it."

Sark blinked. "Okay," it was an almost weary resignation, "I'll get your database for you."

Irina had smiled in relief, feeling some chance to re-establish relations with the man who had once been her protégé. She still had hopes of a rapprochement. She had taken Sark on almost as an injured bird, and nurtured him and raised him – but as her hunting falcon. Now that he was flying free, would he eventually choose to return to her wrist of his own accord?

She hoped to establish a more equal relationship, but not a totally open one. She hadn't truly discussed her own thoughts with him: that her theory about Rambaldi didn't truly explain Sydney and Sark. It had often puzzled her why Rambaldi had indicated – certainly with Sydney and even from her cursory reading of Sark's page she knew it was the same with him – of how potentially destructive they could be to his prophesies, to his 'powers'. It was almost as though he needed them to fulfil part of his prophesies, but that he feared them too: that their strength, which he needed, was the very thing about them which could destroy him. Tools forged for his use, but made so sharp that they were the only things that could cut him?

As she smiled and moved on to charming small-talk, she was unaware that in her body, moving slowly through her, a tiny passive tracker had just begun to ping out its signal to Jack Bristow and the CIA. Prior to Panama, Jack had secretly implanted one in her, without anyone knowing. Jack Bristow had totally trusted Irina Derevko on the Panama mission – he had totally trusted her to jump bail and run for it.

After all, that was what he would have done.

_Author's note_: this is the one chapter in the book that I'm actively unhappy with - no matter what I do with it, it seems to drag and slow the story down. I think it's because it has to symbolically traverse Sark's 'teenage' years; it has to take him from Irina's servant to a reasonably balanced independence without a crass severing of everything between them, and that takes quite a few words - plus I had to get a lot of Rambaldi stuff in here.

For me this chapter feels like a self-contained short-story within the novel. Trouble is, that whenever I tried to take it out or spread the salient points throughout other chapters and so delete this chapter, I lost Sark's development arc.

Hmmn … not happy with it … I don't really know why it doesn't work for me, it just doesn't.


	27. Chapter 27

**Chapter 27: Volte'** - _a move allowing the adversary's attack to slip past harmlessly as the protagonist's counter-thrust angles in. _

Two days later, Kendall's disbelieving anger squealed out.

"What? - with Vaughn's life hanging in the balance you had the whole of Sark to aim at and instead of just plugging him you shot the gun out of his hand? What were you, aiming for his dick but you missed?"

Sydney forced herself not to blink, not exactly easy in the face of a furious Kendall. Losing Mom and losing Sark during their pursuit of a genetic database in Stuttgart was not really a problem, the mission had gotten so fucked up that in the end nobody had really expected to catch either of them anyway, but her shooting the gun out of Sark's hand instead of just shooting Sark? That was a problem.

They were back in L.A. and Kendall was venting his wrath at yet another screw up with his name partly on it. He saw no reason not to, he'd just had another call from head office, his latest try for promotion had failed.

_The fucking CIA! I've devoted my entire life to them and this is their reward? They don't fucking deserve me! Christ – when I think of the people I've turned down 'alternative offers' from _ – he directed his fury at Sydney.

"You had a choice of Vaughn's safety versus Sark, and you chose _Sark?"_

Prompted by Kendall's squeal of disbelief, Sydney looked across at Vaughn who sat tight-faced next to her. He was wearing a closed look, strangely unreadable.

Since they'd returned from Stuttgart, things were as bad for them as they had ever been. For all that Vaughn cared for Sydney, she could not return it and she knew it, because the fact was that Kendall's assertions were correct: on a balcony in a stairwell in Stuttgart, Sydney hadn't killed Sark, hadn't even tried to shoot him even though he'd had Vaughn at gunpoint and with every appearance of being about to put a bullet in his head. In shooting the gun out of Sark's hand, instead of just shooting Sark, she had risked Vaughn's life to avoid hurting Sark.

When she had rounded that balcony and seen Sark below her, his sudden presence had hit her with the force of a physical blow. She'd frozen but realised something, that with her gun happening to be aiming right at his body that no force on earth was going to make her pull the trigger - no matter how angry she told herself she felt about him. Part of her cared about Sark, part of her resented him, almost all of her was confused by him but none of her had wanted to kill him or to see him captured and held helpless; a big-cat trapped in a tiny cage, poked and prodded for cruel amusement. Her mother had psychologically withstood such an imprisonment only because she had obviously always had her escape planned. Sydney had feared what such a hopeless, unending, captivity would do to Sark. She feared that if he were ever subject to such, then he might not come out the same man who had gone in

Vaughn had seen her deliberately choose to shoot the gun out of Sark's hand, and in so doing risk him. He knew just what she had done. A couple couldn't just laugh that off and pretend it hadn't happened.

He had been tentative with her on their return, tender-footing around the issue, painfully aware of it yet afraid to broach it head on. He had presented her with a small blue box. Unable to look him in the eye she had taken it, expecting to find the worst of all things inside: an engagement ring. Instead, when she'd opened it, she had been deeply puzzled to find a man's watch: an aged, old-fashioned, clunky wristwatch, one that wasn't even ticking.

She had looked up, her face showing the perplexity she felt.

"It was my Dad's."

At his words, Sydney had felt something cold grip tightly around her heart. She had thought that an engagement ring could be the worst possible content of this particular Pandora's Box, but she had been wrong: this watch could be a lot worse. Vaughn's voice had carried on.

"It was the last thing he gave me, before he left on his last mission."

It was unreasonable of her, but Sydney had felt a sudden flashing anger: he was dragging his dad into it, the man whom records showed had been killed by her mother.

_Yes, I get the message Vaughn. That my mother is a murderer, and your father was a saint she martyred._

The fact that Vaughn had never, ever, said it that way, and was a man who almost certainly never would, was not something she had factored in. She had been completely on the defensive.

"Dad bequeathed it to me, it was almost like he knew he wasn't coming back. Do you know what he said to me Syd? He said: _Mike, you could set your heart by this watch, always remember that Mike_." He had taken her hands in his. "This watch Sydney, this watch stopped the day I met you."

And it was right then that she knew it was over, because staring solemnly up at him, with his hands reverentially clasping hers, she had fought down the terrible urge to laugh out loud, to voice a jagged, hysterical, abusive hilarity. _What? – 'my dad's watch stopped the day I met you'. What's that, some cheesy pick up line you use in bars?_

She had felt a swirl of insanity in her head.

He had carried on, seemingly unaware of what she was thinking. "It was as though he were telling me that you were the one Syd. It was Dad's way of saying that you and I were made for each other."

_How? – he died decades before we ever met!_

Standing there, loosely holding The Holy Watch, she had fought down an hysterical, violent and twisted urge to smash it under her boot heel and race from the life Vaughn was trying to present her. A normal life, built of homely comforts: a life she was suddenly terrified would crush her under the weight of its mundanity.

In the debriefing room she looked again at his expression and felt a wariness. She abruptly feared that she had to get out her version of Stuttgart's events before Vaughn gave his.

"I was aiming at Sark," she replied, "but I hit the stair rail and the bullet deflected taking the gun out of his hand."

Compete bullshit, but completely believable bullshit to anyone who hadn't actually been there, and only three people had - she, Sark and Vaughn. She wasn't going to tell, Sark wasn't around to tell, and Vaughn? She flicked another look at him.

"Fine!" barked Kendall, "there was a deflection. So why didn't you shoot at Sark again when he'd lost his gun?"

_Yeah, why didn't you Syd?_ sneered her inner jeering voice. _What was Sark, too pretty to shoot? You tell yourself you hate him, that he's beneath you, that you despise him, that you don't care for him, but you can't bring yourself to put a bullet in him?_

_Fuck! _Sydney rallied herself, shoving aside her doubts and confusions – right now this wasn't about Sark, right now this was about staying ahead of Kendall's suspicions.

"Agent Bristow," barked Kendall, "I asked you a question!"

_Come on Syd, don't crack. Why didn't you shoot Sark? You knew this question was coming and you know the answer you cooked up for it - dammit, you practiced it in the bathroom mirror this morning! Go for it!_

"I didn't shoot at Sark because I was concerned for Agent Vaughn."

"What?" Kendall's riposte was so derisive it was almost a snort of laughter. He obviously wasn't willing to buy any of it. "What are trying to say Sydney? That you thought you were going to miss Sark and hit Vaughn by mistake, even though you were accurate enough to have just shot the gun out of the bastard's hand? Oh, I'm sorry – you _accidentally_ shot the gun out of Sark's hand, on a _deflection_."

"I believed Agent Vaughn was already wounded and unable to defend himself - "

Kendall's disbelief became even more extreme. "So you let his attacker just run around uninjured?"

" – and thus I didn't dare injure Sark." It was a statement so paradoxical that it was shocking. It got Kendall's attention. In the silence Sydney was able to carry on with her explanation. "I knew we needed to capture Sark alive for intel on Sloane and Derevko," – _that's it, refer to Mom by her surname, make it seem like you don't care at all, get those CIA Good Girl points in the bank! _– "so I knew I couldn't kill him."

'And?" Kendall's voice was waspish but he was secretly worried. He'd thought he'd been about to nail Sydney Bristow, and now maybe he wouldn't. _Shit she might actually have an explanation for this!_

"And thus any shot must only injure. Unfortunately, it occurred to me that Sark would be armed with more than just the gun that had accidentally been shot out of his hand, and I strongly feared that if I did shoot to injure, and if he realised he was going to be captured and had nothing to lose, then even injured he could have drawn another weapon and killed Vaughn anyway." Sydney galloped on with her explanation, trying not to give anyone time to pull it to pieces. "I knew that if I didn't shoot him, then he would just run for it, leaving Vaughn without any further injury."

_What a cooked-up crock!_ - _but were they gonna go for it?_

Sydney tried to keep her breathing even, forcing herself not to dwell on the multitude of stupidities inherent in her explanation, chief among them that there was no way the supremely logical Sark would have killed the hurt Vaughn if Sark had been shot. He'd have needed him alive to use as a hostage in leveraging his escape or, if he genuinely thought capture was imminent, he wouldn't have stacked the deal against him by wantonly killing a CIA agent.

Sydney told herself that she may not have known Sark well, but she knew him well enough for that.

Kendall looked doubtful, but from Sydney's perspective doubtful was a hell of a lot better than outright disbelief which was where he'd been mere minutes ago. Sensing she had him toppling, Sydney shoved hard.

"I believed my duty was to protect Agent Vaughn, as I hope everyone would agree."

She wondered just how hot a shower she'd need to wash off the stink of sanctimony.

Kendall flicked her a baleful, bitter look. He looked like a man robbed of a prize.

Sydney's inner cheerleaders broke into a victory roll: _Yay Syd!_

And then Kendall's eyes gave a sly gleam; the look of a man who's just remembered he has an ace up his sleeve. His glance slid to Vaughn. "So, Agent Vaughn, can you corroborate any of this?"

_Fuck!_ Sydney flicked an anxious look at Vaughn, only to see him glance back at her; he seemed hurt, betrayed … vindictive? He opened his mouth to speak and Sydney suddenly feared he was going to damn her. She'd been in custody before, people out there still thought she should be locked up for that prophesy shit alone, what were they going to do to her now they could throw Sark into the mix?

The voice carried full and clear, silencing the room. "Sydney is lying."

All three of them, Sydney, Kendall and Vaughn, looked toward the fourth person sitting in the room, toward the man who had spoken: Jack Bristow.

Kendall felt the earth shift on its axis. _Jack Bristow's about to betray his baby girl and wring her out to dry? Just how many fucking Christmases have come at once?_ Sydney felt the floor fall away from her as she stared dumbfounded: _Daddy? Daddy?_

She pulled the sleeves of her jacket convulsively round her, wrapping it about her almost like a blanket or a tent, and then learned that she needn't do that ever again because Jack continued smoothly, lying flat in the face of the CIA to protect his only child. 'Sydney is lying to protect me."

Ten minutes later Kendall glared at the Bristows, his gaze flickering between them. How many Christmases had come at once? _Fucking none!_ He knew he was being lied to, but he couldn't pin down either Jack or his brat.

His voice spat out. "Do you seriously expect me to believe any of that?"

"That is my report." Jack was perfectly calm in response.

"That you suspected Sark was playing a double game and so you advised Sydney not to shoot unless it was in absolute self-defence?" Kendall's voice carried the injured squeal of an only child who'd just been forced to share a toy. "There's virtually no evidence to support that theory!"

"As I said, there is the Mexico City Echelon intercept and the ludicrous ease with which we rescued the Caplans. And as for the lack of direct evidence, well if Sark is double-gaming against a man like Arvin Sloane then we can hardly expect Sark to issue a written invitation to watch, now can we?"

Sydney was stunned, hardly breathing, her mind reeling. Part of her was crazily elated that her dad was unswervingly going to bat for her, part of her wondered if he could pull it off, and part was struggling to take in precisely what he was saying: Sark could be double gaming against Sloane? Sark might have tipped off the CIA about the firebombing in Mexico, saving as many lives as he could? Did this mean that in holding on to some idea of Sark as a human being, that she might not be nuts after all?

The war between her father and Kendall raged on.

"And you never told anyone about your theory through official channels?" Kendall's voice still held that outraged squeak.

"I don't have to. In the Derevko/Rambaldi/Sloane scenario I have official sanction. And in any case, official channels can be compromised. Counting 'contacts' there are thousands of people working for the CIA, who knows how many of them have connections to Arvin Sloane? The place is a sieve." At these words Kendall forced himself not to blink, thinking of all the 'unofficial offers' he'd had in his career. "If Sark were working against him – at whatever level – then risking having it reported back to Sloane is of no advantage to us. I repeat our earlier over-riding orders: _Sloane is the objective_."

And at those words both Jack and Kendall stiffened even further and challengingly held each other's gazes. Sydney shifted, suddenly alert to the increased tension. What was going on? Why had Dad's words triggered this ratchetting up of hostility? Neither Jack nor Kendall blinked, Kendall wondering if he dared to sling the accusation that was on his mind and Jack silently challenging him to Bring It On. Both were dwelling on the same subject, Jack's behaviour and tactics during the CIA's Stuttgart effort to recapture Irina Derevko, to recapture the woman who was still Jack's wife and to seal her up alive in a glass box: this time, forever.

The Stuttgart tactics breach between Jack and Kendall had only announced itself when, from across the Atlantic, Sydney had called out that Sark was taking out surveillance in the Brucker Biotech building were the database was housed. Kendall had wanted to send in the CIA team immediately, they had a lock on Sark and Derevko, there was no Sloane but two out of three was good enough for him. Jack had argued against it, or in Kendall's suspicion, he had stalled for time for Irina Derevko. _"It makes it more difficult, but not impossible. The transmitter is still active, we can track them, Sloane is the objective."_

"_Sloane may or may not be there, they may or may not be working with Sloane."_

Verbally the two men had sprung at each other like dogs in a yard, with Jack furiously trying to hold off Kendall's logic as to why they shouldn't scoop up Irina and Sark while they could. Jack had only given the call to move in when Irina was already off the grid, her passive tracker nulled by some electronic overload.

Kendall felt the seethe of bitterness. He knew he would get nowhere pursuing his stalling-for–Derevko argument, he could never prove it, so he switched back to attacking Jack's defence of Sydney.

"So you suspected Sark was playing a double game and you advised Sydney not to shoot unless it was in absolute self-defence, but you never thought to warn any of the other field agents?"

"Warn them of what? That Sark might not shoot them? I thought it was irresponsible to do so, if their survival urge toward Sark was dulled, then he might kill them anyway."

Kendall's eyes gleamed and his heartbeat raced. He spoke slyly. "But you were quite happy to blunt your own daughter's instincts?"

Sydney's breath caught, _Dad you've been trapped!_

Jack was completely unperturbed. "I wasn't happy to, but I thought it was necessary. Sydney is the only field agent to take on Sark and regularly either win or fight him to a draw, she was the only real danger to him, so of course I told her when I told no-one else - " Sydney invisibly punched the air: _that's my Dad! The Houdini of Lies!_ "I relied upon her field judgement to make the correct call. In my opinion her call was good. Sark is still out there possibly making trouble for Sloane, and, more importantly, possibly turnable as a double agent for us, and Vaughn," he flicked a vaguely dismissive look in Vaughn's direction, "is still alive."

Sydney forcibly kept the grin off her face: _Go Dad!_

Kendall knew he was a man getting nowhere, but he tried anyway. "Vaughn, what do you say?"

Jack cut Vaughn off. "Vaughn's opinion is irrelevant, all he knows is that he saw Sydney shoot the gun out of Sark's hand, but that hardly matters, because the reason _why_ is what is important, and I have given you that reason." He had just completely nullified anything Vaughn might have said or not said. His gaze hit Kendall like a brick wall. _Come on you scheming, slimy, careerist bastard, call me a liar to my face if you dare!_

Kendall didn't dare. He realised he couldn't bring down Jack Bristow in a frontal attack so he retreated for the time being, covering his withdrawal with some face-saving bluster. "About the only success we've had recently is the capture of the di Regno heart ahead of Sloane and Derevko getting to it. If you hadn't been instrumental in that Agent Bristow," he glared at Sydney, "then right now things would be looking a lot worse for you than they are."

The meeting broke up and he was left sitting behind his desk, teeth gritted, fists balled, thinking furiously.

Well, they thought they'd won did they? Those damned Bristows? He forced himself to breathe slowly, waiting for his mind to clear: it did. He took a card out of his wallet showing the contact number of a non-existent down-town dry cleaning company. He flicked the card with his thumbnail. It had been a while now, but was that number still active?

What would the person who was ultimately at the other end want of him? More to the point, what could they offer in return?

He'd been surprised when he'd been given the card, but also flattered, quite flattered enough to keep it. After all, Arvin Sloane may have been a criminal, but he was still one of the most powerful and influential operatives there was.

Maybe they could trade?


	28. Chapter 28

**Chapter 28:** **Spada Libera** - _ "Keeping your sword free". Keeping your sword in such a way that the opponent does not have leverage on it or the "advantage of the sword"_

Sark looked at his hand encompassed in an ice-pack, it was still slightly swollen. Well, having a gun shot out of your grip tended to do that to you.

Goddamn Sydney Bristow – I wish I'd never met her! 

Mere days ago he'd been planning to kill Irina partly because she was a threat to Sydney. Well, travelling back to Russia in a private jet, surveying the recent events of Brucker Biotech at Stuttgart with the extra deaths involved, he never wanted to see Sydney again. In Brucker Biotech he'd been a screw tightened one turn too many and the thread had finally snapped. He told himself he no longer cared about Sydney, Irina, any of it. No that wasn't true, he did care about Sydney, but he was determined to get away from the whole Rambaldi-obsessed mess.

Inside Brucker Biotech, during his and Irina's raid on the DNA database, Sark had died yet again for Irina.

What had he come back as this time, the ghost of a ghost?

He had made up his mind that he had done it for the last time. He could die no more times for Irina, he didn't have another resurrection left in him.

As part of the job when stealing the database, Irina had stipulated that no-one was to know that they were ever there. He knew full well what Irina and he had arranged as their method of 'no-one knowing they were ever there' - detonating a charge to rip through the building. Irrespective of what Irina said, fundamentally he still would not believe in the prophesies, or that he had a role in them – he couldn't, the survival of his sense of self wouldn't allow it. Hence, for him the bomb going off had been one more round of utterly motiveless killing.

Another round of it, to add to his earlier career high of incinerating a church congregation.

Despite that, flying back into Russia he still felt a terrible sense of guilt about rejecting Irina, it was as though he really had rejected his own mother. But had he really broken away from her? He couldn't, really, could he? He doubted he could ever make himself stop caring about Sydney at any rate because even now he was plagued by the memory of what she had done, or rather of what she had not done.

In a stairwell at Brucker Biotech she had not shot him.

He had held Agent Michael Vaughn at gunpoint, with the ostensible aim of shooting the little git in the head, and Little Miss Perfect had not shot him. Faced with an unmissable opportunity to nail him, or at least injure him and capture him – and when he'd been aiming at lover boy's head for Chrissakes – she had not put a bullet in him. She'd had his whole body to aim at and what had she done? – shot the gun out of his hand! She didn't even shoot after she'd disarmed him! What? - she didn't shoot again because she'd run out of ammunition? He knew the CIA were subject to budgetary constraints, but not even they were cheap enough to send a field agent out with only one bullet in her gun! No, if she had wanted to shoot him she could have done so right then.

Sark's jaw ground in annoyance. It was paradoxical, but he was almost angry that she had not shot him. It put him in her debt. _And the way she did it was so damned typical of her, managing not to shoot me but still being judgemental about it! _He remembered the look on her face after she'd blasted the gun from his hand; along with her usual disgust, anger and disdain at him, she had added a fresh hell – she had looked so utterly disappointed in him.

_What has she got to be disappointed about? I was only living down to my reputation, she'd be disappointed if I did anything else! Besides, I wasn't going to shoot him anyway! If she'd waited three more seconds she'd have found that out!_

The CIA had moved in on the building as Sark was moving out. He had set the charge, giving he and Irina minutes to get away. He had known that it would probably kill scores of people. He had been filled with a kind of self-hate.

And then he had gotten the heads-up on something that pushed aside all self-loathing in a blast of unholy glee. Through a porthole window in a stairwell doorway he saw the CIA coming at him. Two of them. An unknown operative and … well hey, what did you know? Life may give you lemons, but sometimes you can turn them into pure hydrochloric acid. Fate had handed him a glorious release for all of his self-disgust, anger and frustration: the chance to beat the living shit out of one of the most annoying twats he knew, that righteous, pompous, ineffectual, undeserving, furrow browed, pursed mouthed, pissy faced little whinger, Agent Michael Vaughn.

It had come down to hand-to-hand and within seconds one thing was clear: Vaughn had never been properly taught how to fight. He had fought like it was a schoolyard brawl, uncoordinated attempts at grappling, moves too telegraphed and slow: wide, swinging punches. In contrast, Sark did not fight as though combat were a confusing random melee that one just hoped to get through, Sark engaged in combat as though it were physical chess. Irina had made damned sure that he did. Just one of the many things he owed her for. Just one of the many things he should never have had to learn in the first place.

The quick, vicious exchange – with elegant, concise brutality ranged against panic-stricken flailing - had ended as it was destined to, with Vaughn tossed ignominiously down the stairs. During the fight – if you could call it a fight – Sark had driven a crunching blow into Vaughn's undefended ribs, only to find that: _Oh look, Vaughn's wearing the bullet-proof vest his mummy knitted for him. _

Within seconds Sark had flattened Vaughn to the floor with a shot to his protected chest, using the man's own gun. He'd then moved down the stairs on him with all the fluid elegance of a young, gun-toting Mikhail Baryshnikov and had taken aim at Vaughn's head, aiming to kill. After all, killing the little pratt was the logical thing to do.

Except that he couldn't do it.

Looking back on it, he knew it wasn't anything to do with Vaughn's pathetic struggles to get up and stay alive - he was inured to pathetic struggles, particularly Vaughn's - it was to do with Sydney. He _couldn't_ kill Vaughn, because if he did then Sydney could never forgive him. Worse still, although she didn't know it yet, Sydney had already lost Francie Calfo, if he had killed Vaughn then she would have been left with nothing.

He had pointed Vaughn's own gun at the man's head and had quite simply not known what to do.

And then Sydney Bristow made it easy for him, she had shot the gun out of his hand.

A short while ago, the concept - that Sydney would risk her boyfriend's life for him - would have left him elated. Well, now he wanted to be free of her. It was a wish, no a _need_ to escape everything Rambaldi-related she was knotted up in. But at the same time … he felt almost a duty to stay involved and protect her. It was as though part of him were under secret orders where Sydney was concerned.

Trying to harden himself against her he folded his arms and mentally rattled through a list of Sydney's flaws. She was a prim, vindictive, adolescent drama-queen. Hell, she wasn't even mature enough to be a drama-queen, she was a drama-_princess_.

She was judgmental and high-handed, immature and needy. Selfish? Hell, she was so selfish that even before poor little Francie Calfo had been killed – Sark's mind veered away from the exact circumstances of that – her life had been mangled up anyway. From records Sark knew that Sydney had gotten in the way of Francie's marriage to her fiancé Charlie, taking it upon herself to de-rail it because of Charlie's infidelities and not giving Francie any real choice in the matter! Talk about high-handed! And did 'high-handed' even begin to describe her? Her treatment of Marcus Dixon was breath-takingly arrogant. She, Miss Emotional Problems, had set herself up in judgement on him and had decided that Dixon wasn't to be told the true circumstances of his life at SD-6, that he couldn't be trusted to bear up under the truth! _Marcus Bloody Dixon?_ Sark clenched his jaw in annoyance. He had no love for Dixon – precisely because the man was so good at his job – but by the same token he damn well respected him. Marcus Dixon's rectitude, solidity and sheer patriotism were above any possible doubt. If asked even he, Sark, would have nominated Dixon as the missing face on Mount Rushmore, but Sydney? Oh no, she in her wisdom had decided that Dixon wasn't fit to know the truth about his own life!

And talk about hypocritical! Was that even a strong enough word for it? What about the time she'd weaselled her way in to Sloane's house to access his safe under cover of a personal 'farewell' dinner for the cancer stricken and, at that point, dying Emily Sloane? She had exploited the dying Emily as a tool to burgle Sloan's safe!

And ungrateful? Oh she certainly was! At Emily's 'funeral' after the woman's faked death upon remission, had Sydney respected the situation even though she thought Emily was genuinely dead? No! She'd used the Eulogy as a tool for tearing into Jack Bristow, effectively using it to list all his failings as a father. Christ but the man would lay down his life for her! – what more did she want from him?

He coldly weighed up all the cons against her and – _oh buggering hell!_ He expelled a breath of sheer exasperation because, nope, not even listing all her faults had helped – dammit he still _liked_ her! In fact, sod it to damnation, he even felt guilty about her! When he had run down the Stuttgart stairwell away from Sydney, he had been convinced that she would come after him, trying to catch him. He had been sure he could lure her out of the building and away from the imminent explosion. Although Sydney's wrath had impelled her instead to stay and seek out her mother, he still felt that his failure to absolutely ensure Sydney's safety had represented some strange dereliction of duty.

He glared unseeingly out of a porthole window.

The guilt he had felt about 'abandoning' Sydney obliged him to help Irina further by covering for her as she dealt with Sloane at his villa. Well, now he felt straight with Irina. She had lost the DNA database they had stolen and he did not feel obliged to get it back for her, furthermore he had been party to rescuing her when the CIA had raided Sloane's villa. As far as he was concerned, he had discharged all debts to her. As to any she owed him, well he didn't want to meet her long enough to collect. He had his own life now, and his own problems.

And one of them was now James.

He twisted in his seat, glowering. He could almost spit with wrath.

He remembered back to the flaring bitterness of their farewell in the Dacha. He refused to even acknowledge the earlier episode he'd suffered in the bathroom. Every time he thought of her he could almost choke with the mixture of resentment and bitterness she provoked within him, that and … a vague, chest-twisting, painful –

He slammed the door on it.

He felt _nothing_ – that's what he felt!

If he felt anything, he felt _angry_! A _justified_ anger! She deserved everything he might do! She deserved everything she was going to get! She'd hurt him and then she'd kept on hurting him, _and that was against the rules!_

_I don't care about her! I won't care about her!_

He had tried calling her earlier to taunt her, but the call hadn't connected. He was not overly worried, in-flight mobile phone calls were notoriously fickle.

Seething, he looked down at his gun-hand and wondered if the swelling had caused his aim to be off when covering Irina's escape from Sloane's Italian villa. If his aim had been absolutely bang on, could he have shot Dixon before Dixon had shot Emily Sloane dead? Yep, Emily was dead, she had seemingly escaped cancer only to be gunned down in the crossfire between Sloane and the CIA.

Sark reflected that there was something almost classically tragic about it.

Sark had known who had pulled the trigger, from his raised vantage point in the escape helicopter he'd had a reasonable view of things, but he hadn't told Sloane. Emily Sloane was dead, and Sark saw no reason to spread the misery over a woman he hardly knew. Sark didn't know what would be visited upon Dixon if Sloane uncovered who had killed his wife, but he was willing to bet it would be something nasty, something very Websterian.

Dixon better start watching his back.

Sark reflected that had no idea where Sloane was now – he was probably hunting down after Emily's killer. Well, as long as the man was away from him, he didn't really care.

Angry, scowling, he looked out of the porthole window as he flew east into the gathering darkness.


	29. Chapter 29

**Chapter 29: Blade And Bravazzo**

_Blade - a dashing young man._

_Bravazzo - a swashbuckler, a swaggerer, a ruffian._

Sark told himself that he wasn't worried when he still couldn't get James Dodgson on his mobile when he landed back in Russia. She'd probably wangled to have the phone switched off at her end, he thought - the conniving cat! Not that it would do her any good, what? –she thought she could stop _him_?

He told himself he was only slightly unsettled as he was still unable to contact her as he drove away from the airfield.

He was still fighting down an unwanted unease even as he couldn't get contact speeding up the drive toward the Dacha.

And then he saw the house.

The place was burned to the ground. A charred, smoking, stinking wreck. Utterly incinerated, along with everything in it.

The car squealed to a halt. For a split second he wondered if it were a hit and that the driver were in on it. Unthinkingly Sark's hand was on the butt of his automatic, and then he saw the driver's face and knew the man had known nothing about this. The driver looked behind him to check the rear and then flung the car into reverse and made to get away. Sark roared at him to stop.

He kicked the limousine door open and stumbled out into the smoky air. The fire had obviously been burning for hours and had only just burned down, the air was full of motes of ash. It stung his eyes. He could taste it in his throat. A few upright scorched timbers made the place look like the blackened skeleton of some great beast which had been slaughtered and then cremated. Pulped ash was the only other residue. He lurched toward the remains, his eyes wild, his mouth open in some mindless, soundless scream, his hands in his hair, the sight almost sinking him to his knees.

He knew that in three seconds he was going to start screaming, and that he might not be able to stop, ever.

And then he saw flickering movement just inside the tree cover to his right and took action.

There were three men in the trees, no woman. Not one of the men was his. His driver yanked out an automatic rifle from the front passenger foot well, and emptied the magazine at the enemy from behind the cover of the driver-side door. Sark simply stood his ground in the open without any cover at all and slammed bullets at them. He didn't even try to move, he simply stood there and shot at them, defended only by the shield of his own wrath. He wanted at least one of them alive, but there was no time for delicacy of aim and he did not get his way.

Two cars tore up the driveway.

He turned to fight them, but there were too many men. He steeled to face whatever was coming and saw a massive FPG haul himself out of the first car, weapon in hand. At the sight of the carnage and the smoking Dacha, FPG was utterly horrified and Sark knew then that whatever had happened it had not been the result of some co-ordinated internal coup.

A cell-phone rang on one of the dead men.

Sark felt almost mindless but his training broke through. He answered it, speaking in Russian: 'Hello?'

There was an annoyed click of the tongue from the other end. "Fackin' 'ell you stupid bleeders, 'aven't I told you to speak English?"

Simon Walker.

Sark was assailed by a boiling wrath, a screaming rage and a horrible hope that James might still be alive somewhere. His mind was almost white with fury but he instinctively knew that the way to play this was not to give way to his wrath but to be Mr. Sark.

"Hello Wanker, still can't get the hang of the filthy foreign lingo then?"

There was a silence following Sark's vicious, flowing delivery and then a blurt of laughter. "You bastard, I knew you weren't gonna be easy to kill! Dead are they mate?"

Walker was obviously referring to his own men – the group from which Sark had taken the cell-phone.

Sark knew that information was power.

"Not quite, one's still alive enough for me to question." A lie, but Walker didn't know that. Sark forced himself to broach what he feared most, horrified that the answer might be 'no': was James still alive?

"You've stolen someone who belongs to me Walker," he hissed silkily, "and I never like people who touch my things."

"Ah, cheer up. We 'aven't touched her. There's only one bullet-hole in her mate, and that's the one you put there."

Sark's mind twisted with a spasm of rage at the accusation even as he analysed what Walker had said: they've got her and she's still alive. His voice was like boiling pitch. "Give her back or torturing you to death will become my hobby." He offered an alternative. "On the other hand if you release her, then instead I will make you a wealthy man."

Carrot and stick.

There was a silence down the other end, and then someone else spoke.

"Ah, Mr. Sark, so youthful … " the voice was slow, insinuating. "If only you'd listened to me earlier. You see, Mr. Walker isn't in the business of making deals as he works for me in this matter, and I require to keep Dr. Dodgson until I'm finished with her - "

_Until I'm finished with her_ – the words detonated in Sark's head, their threat implicit.

" – I did say she was far more useful to me than you were, don't you recall?" The voice slowed further, deploying its usual unctuous tone. "Goodbye Mr. Sark. You know, I shouldn't think we shall meet again. However, I'm not without politeness so I will give you the opportunity to say farewell to Dr. Dodgson."

Sark blocked a scream of rage and horrified disbelief in his throat.

At his end Arvin Sloane handed the cell-phone back to Simon Walker, who gripped a struggling James. Walker held the phone tauntingly close to her. Before she was silenced her last word to Sark was a shriek of: "Echelon!"

At the sound of her panicked scream Sark snapped and began snarling out threats down the line; an untrammelled spate of words. The contact went dead with Sark still roaring down his end of it. As he became aware that the connection was defunct he looked at the mobile in his hand, his expression almost comically quizzical, looking at it as though it were some impertinent thing which had dared to let him down. He abruptly punched to redial the caller. There was no answer from the far set. At the other end, the phone had been switched off.

_What? They don't even want to negotiate? I've lost her?_

His mind skittered about, horrified, unable to lock onto anything logical. Her last word to him was 'Echelon'? What, that was all she could think of to say? She didn't want to tell him anything else? She despised him that much? And then he got it: she'd been informing him. Arvin Sloane had either accessed Echelon or had he had somehow bugged Sark's mobile-phone, either way he had tracked the few calls Sark had made to her at the Dacha and had tracked her down that way. How did she know about Echelon? Why _wouldn't _she? Geeks talked to each other, he guessed. The relentlessly logical James had worked it out and had used her one chance to tell him. She had not wanted him wasting valuable time on working out who had betrayed him when she already knew. Staring ahead, face a white mask marked only by livid red on his cheekbones, Sark tightened his fist round the mobile phone at the knowledge of just who the traitor in his organisation really was.

Among the men at the burnt out Dacha, the person who had betrayed Mr. Sark, was Sark.

Thousands of miles away and well out of Sark's range, Walker felt a gnawing unease as Sloane cut the call to Sark. The deal with Sloane had gotten worse from the moment he'd hopped on board. It had started as some hired muscle with a bit of cunning attached and now it was devolving toward a case of the cold blooded murder of a woman half his size.

The woman in question struggled in the grip of his left hand.

"Get the fuck off me you goddamn BoySkank!"

Walker looked down at her. _Uh? BoySkank? Is that even a word?_

James continued to struggle as Sloane moved toward her, holding his hands out, palms forward, as though approaching a panicking animal.

"Dr. Dodgson, things will go much more smoothly for you if you do not struggle."

Simon Walker had time to think, _things'd go much more smoothly loony-tunes if you'd just fuck off, _when James went for his balls.

Using it like a base-ball bat she slammed her forearm back and down in a hard quick arc, straight into his crotch. The whole of Walker's body jerked up and he half-screamed as he let go his grip on her. James set off running, knocking aside Arvin Sloane as she aimed for a far door. She was wrestling with the handle when a bullet blasted a chunk of plaster from the wall next to her. The sound of the gunshot reverberated in the room.

Her head jerked in the direction of the shooter, Arvin Sloane was holding a gun on her.

He won't shoot – he needs me for this Rambaldi crap! 

"Hey Arvin? Did you know that your name means The People's Friend? Why don'tcha try living up to it for once?"

Sloane aimed the gun squarely at her head, effectively silencing her.

"My wife is dead."

Sloane's four words stilled any possibility of verbal exchange, their tone and content conveying just how empty he was. James didn't need to ask if the bereavement had been recent and she didn't dare think of its circumstances. He approached her, gun straight out, coming at her with slow, measured steps until the muzzle of his pistol was inches from her face.

His eyes held all the life and spark of two brown pebbles.

She stared at him in round eyed disbelief. _Christ, he's going to kill me!_

"Two weeks ago Dr. Dodgson, I would have done anything to keep you alive, but now I just don't care any more, because my wife was murdered two days ago by the CIA."

Sloane lied so smoothly that often you couldn't tell when he was doing it, but when he was telling an unpalatable truth? That was different, he was so unpractised at 'truth' that it quivered like a shivering, naked, new-born thing in his eyes. When he told James he'd kill her, she knew he meant it.

He quite audibly cocked the next round into the chamber, steadying his aim at her head.

From away at the other end of the room, crouched over and holding his balls, Simon Walker had one thought: _shit, this wasn't part of the deal!_

"Sorry about that Mr. Sloane."

"What?" Sloane's concentration broke off from a horrified James as he turned toward Walker.

"Sorry about that, she got the jump on me." Walker kept talking, saying anything really, anything to take Sloane's mind off squeezing the trigger. Walker didn't go in for cold-blooded murder, thieving was more his game, and besides although she'd whammed him in the balls – twice - when it came to Dodgson … he _liked_ the little nutter. "What can I say, won't happen again."

Sloane stared at Walker and then turned slowly back to James, uncocking the gun and directing it away from her face, shaking his head in an almost paternal exasperation. "I just can't seem to get the help these days."

He let the gun hang loose in one hand, almost as though he had forgotten it, and lead James back into the centre of the room as though leading her into a dance.

As Sloane rambled on at her side, James could feel her heartbeat thumping in her chest. Her legs almost wouldn't hold her up. Black speckles dotted before her eyes. She had come _that close_ to death, and at the hands of the man who only seconds later was now making polite conversation with her.

If she hadn't realised it before, she was aware of it now – of just how unstable Arvin Sloane really was.

As Arvin accompanied her his mind was drifting off into some dark space, a place where he had to view over and over again what had happened to Emily. And then to what had happened to her afterward, after he had abandoned her body there. The CIA had autopsied her, and for what? They knew 'cause of death', she died because they had shot her!

And then even worse had come. He had seen a file of the results of the autopsy, and had not even been left with the memory of the Emily he knew. Because the autopsy had found something out about her that he had never known: Emily had once given birth.

Such a devastating secret, and she'd kept from him. They'd lived a life together and she'd kept it in her own private little world, a realm all to herself that he had never even known existed, let alone been invited to share. He wanted revenge for that now, an excoriating revenge for the pain he felt, a revenge so great that it would cleanse him of the unwanted wrath he felt toward her. He did not want revenge upon Emily – he revered her even now, loved her even now, would do anything to get her back, even now - but instead wanted revenge upon those who had killed her, a revenge upon the CIA.

That would be suitable.

That would be fitting.

He wanted a burnt offering so great that it would appease his uneasy spirit and publicly avenge Emily's death.

Without realising how terrifying he looked as he drifted along, he smiled to himself, because shortly he would have just such a revenge.


	30. Chapter 30

**Chapter 30: Falso Filo** - _a strike that is brought to deceive the opponent and then transformed into something else._

"Dad, what do you mean, you think Sark's on our side?" Sydney's tone was almost accusatory. She had rounded on Jack, clamouring for information almost before they had left Kendall's office.

The opinions Jack had voiced to Kendal concerning Sark, about double-gaming, about the potential use of Echelon, had all been things which a mere week ago she would have leapt at and clung to. Well, now what Sydney needed above all regarding Sark was certainty. What was he? - good? bad? - she needed to know. At her words Jack Bristow stared down at his daughter and noted her barely hidden intensity.

_My God, does she really have something going on with Sark? Jesus Christ, where's Irina when you need her?_

He veered away from considering anything between Sydney and Sark.

"Sydney, what I said I that room I said primarily to clear you."

"Dad, just give it to me straight, yes or no? In or out? I need to know. Did you mean that about his use of Echelon to tip off the CIA?"

Jack blinked. "Well, it is certainly logical to suppose he did."

"Then why did he set the bomb off at all?"

"Because he was working to get your mother out of that cell. With hindsight, he obviously needed an enormity pinned at Sloane's door so great that it made letting Irina out to catch him seem a worthwhile risk." Jack was astonished. He was justifying _Sark_? - a man he was wary of letting anywhere near his only child? He tried to redress the balance. "Sydney, your life is your," Jack dodged the use of the word 'affair', "your _business_. However, I will say this, that even if Sark is against Sloane, it does not mean he is for us. Sark is a very dangerous man Sydney, he has his own agenda."

"Dad!" Jack winced at the force in her voice –_ yep, just like her mother!_ "You can't just say what you said to Kendall and then avoid the issue with me! Is he double-gaming or not?"

Jack went on the attack. "Sydney, why do you care? Sark has tried to kill you at least twice! It's in your own reports!" His voice halted abruptly as he saw something odd – Sydney's gaze evasively sliding away from his own. Jack paused. "Sydney, what do you know about Sark that I don't?"

Sydney felt a clutch of panic. "Dad, I … know nothing!"

Jack wondered just how much of a lie his daughter was telling him. "Sydney, a couple of days ago Kendall put a peculiar question to me - "

Sydney's inner alarm went off – _uh oh, this is it_.

" - he point blank asked me if you were having an affair with Sark. I said you weren't, but now I'm asking you directly: are you?"

Sydney was amazed that the implosion in her chest didn't show up on the Richter Scale. She was dumbfounded when her voice came out evenly. "You know, a while back I said to Mom that there was nothing like a Derevko for getting straight to the point. I should have said that there was nothing like a Derevko except for a Bristow."

"You're prevaricating."

"Dad, I'm just letting you know that on the Bristow Family Scale of Weirdness, this conversation rates pretty high - "

"And now you're dissimulating."

"- higher than even Mom turning out to be a spy for the Russkies."

They stared at each other, Jack accusing and Sydney defensive. Both Bristows refused to waver, after all, stubbornness was a family trait.

"You were the one who brought him up in this conversation Sydney _and_ the one who shot the gun out of his hand in Stuttgart. Truthfully, what do you know about him?"

Sydney held her father's gaze. She was being called out and she knew it. It was cards on the table time.

What did she really know about Sark?

_That he'd never tried to kill her, ever. That he'd conspicuously failed to kill her a short while ago in Switzerland. That he'd once made her the offer of explaining himself and that she hadn't let him. That if she'd behaved slightly differently then, he might have been here right now, talking tactics with Dad. And that if he were, then Dad … Dad might have liked him._

"Dad, I don't know anything about Sark." _Oh for God's sake Sydney, get a grip and spit it out!_ – "apart from that … he's never really tried to hurt me." She gabbled to a finish before she could lose her nerve, "not even once."

"What?" Jack sounded astounded. "What about that time in Siberia when he shot the ice out from under you - "

"That was an accident. His finger jerked on the trigger when I pinned him with an ice pick. If he'd wanted to kill me, he could have shot me earlier during that incident because he saw me well before I saw him. And if you're wondering – that time with the acid shower in Paldiski? - he was never going to let me burn. If I'd called his bluff, he would have backed down, I know it."

Jack was aware that Sydney's reports on those incidents hadn't been written up in quite that way. He was still doubtful. Sydney saw his mistrust.

"Look Dad, that guy's had so many chances to kill me now that I've lost count of them, and he hasn't taken a single one. If you want any more proof then … in Switzerland a couple of days ago he had the chance to kill me outright during the Sloane extraction. He had me in his sights at point blank range and he deliberately altered his aim and chose instead to shoot my car off the road."

"Was that event in your report?"

Sydney hung her head. "Not exactly."

Staring down at his daughter's bowed head, Jack was confronted by a truly alarming choice. If Sark were playing a double game and he had his defences lowered towards Sydney, then she might gun Sark down if she was going flat-out and he wasn't. But … if Sark _weren't_ playing a double game and he told Sydney that he was, then his daughter's instincts and reflexes could be blunted, so that Sark might succeed in shooting her even if only by accident. Kendall had been right about one thing, Jack had no intention of blunting his daughter's edge one iota if he were, in fact, hopelessly wrong. He did not want her lowering her guard on the grocery packer at the supermarket, never mind on a man like Sark.

He could imagine Sydney's statement for his predicament: _own petard – hoist on anyone?_

When it came down to it the question was just how much faith did he have that Sark might turn out to be even vaguely human? When it came right down to it, just how much faith did he, Jack, have in his own instincts?

Jack looked hard inside himself, narrowed down his options and took a leap of faith. Well, a leap by Jack's standards, a crouchy, half-step forward by anyone else's.

"Sydney, I don't know what Sark is up to, I doubt anyone does. But," he echoed the words he'd given to Kendall, but this time saying them for real, "if you have a shot at him and it's not in self defence, then consider not taking it."

He left, embarrassed, unwilling to speak further.

Sydney almost fell into a nearby chair. Dad genuinely thought that Sark might be double-gaming? She was dazed.

What did she feel about Sark? Really?

She scolded herself, reminding herself of all the things she'd previously called him, all the things that were still true: he was a killer, a thief, a liar, a deceiver, a traitor. He was capable of committing almost unthinkable enormities – _and if Dad's right about Echelon, he tried to save hundreds of people. Yes, but what did he have to save them from? – his own actions!_ And what else was he? Sydney wanted to slap herself for admitting it, but in his own way he was charming, brave and strangely honest.

She thumped the seat of her chair with her fist, angry at herself.

Stop thinking he's human! He's just a block of marble! Beautifully carved, but still just stone!

He was almost the Devil incarnate, seemingly incapable of sticking to anything like rules, and … she finally started to get a handle on what she felt: she felt cursed with a sense of being responsible for him, of trying to guide him. And just how unfair was that? She hadn't asked for it, she didn't want it, but goddammit it was there! And she still didn't know if he were good, bad or anywhere in between! She had been hoping that her father could clear it up for her, but what he had said had just made it worse, because now she had to cling onto hope.

Goddamn Sark! I wish I'd never met him! 

Off at a distance, Vaughn watched; watched the woman he still regarded at His Girlfriend. For a while now he had been suppressing the unwanted knowledge that something had been going wrong between he and Sydney; well, now he could no longer evade it. Something was going wrong and that something was called Sark. Sark, that twisted bastard she hadn't shot in Stuttgart. Sark, the man she had risked his life in favour of. Sark, the man who in a gunslinging instant she had chosen over him.

He closed his eyes. Why did everything bad always lead back to that cool, cocky, smirking, _frightening_, British blond bastard?

Vaughn never allowed himself to dwell on it, but he was afraid of Sark. Afraid of his coolness, his self-possession, his soul-withering disdain. Afraid of the air he projected that he might just kill Vaughn one day simply to tidy him up as an annoying loose end, as he might casually snip a loose thread off one of his immaculately tailored suits.

Sark was everything Vaughn was not – the anti-Vaughn in a way – and Vaughn had an instinctive understanding that if Sydney were ever to leave him she would pull a complete 180 and go for someone like Sark.

He felt a resentment toward Sark that was born in fear.

He tried to fight down his anger but the more he thought about what Sydney had done in Stuttgart the more hurt he felt. And just before, in that Stuttgart debriefing, the way Jack Bristow had cut him off, the way Sydney had excluded him from adding to her explanation. He knew Sydney had never aimed to shoot Sark, he had seen her do it, but had she and her father really believed he would ever betray her to Kendall?

And Christ, he was trying to patch things up between them, but she wasn't making it easy for him, was she? He recalled the incident of his father's watch, where he'd told her that it had stopped on the day he had first met her, and how she had looked at him in response? She'd smiled but looked as though she secretly wanted to stomp it under the heel of her boot! And she thought he couldn't tell?

Dad's watch! It _had_ stopped the time he'd met her. He recalled his father's far off words: _always keep this watch Mikey, you could set your heart by it – remember this_. Surely Sydney would be impressed by what were in effect a dying man's last words? But it was as though deep down she just didn't want him, as though deep down … she wanted Sark.

Frightened, he tried to fling his anger from him, but was assailed by yet another memory. Jack's words filtering through his mind_ … Vaughn's opinions are irrelevant_. He remembered again what Sydney had done in Stuttgart … _she risked me to let him go …_

Kendall's secretary called for his attention, Mr Kendall wished to see him. In his office Kendall addressed him, a mammoth boulder of flesh hunched on the other side of the desk.

Kendall, a man who was considering contacting Arvin Sloane, a man who was willing to deal with the devil to be free of the Bristows, a man who was seeking out allies against them.

"So Vaughn, what's it like to be dismissed as 'irrelevant' by the Bristows?"


	31. Chapter 31

**Chapter 31: Riposte** - _a counter-attack immediately following a parry, usually in one action._

Sark had said goodbye to the White Devil. He felt compelled to drop the name since Irina's revelation of Page 48, it had given him the creeps to be called by it. He had told himself that it would be flipping the finger to fate to keep it, a big fat Bring It On to whatever was out there, a defiant Fuck You to Rambaldi; but the thing was too unsettling.

The name felt like bad luck now, and some fights weren't worth the winning.

Sark had a plan, he had negotiated transport on a Russian Military flight which would take him and a small crew over the top of the world and quietly drop them in Anchorage, where they could pick up a private jet to get to L.A.. He would arrive completely unannounced with the lowest profile possible: solo. His crew would simply return to Moscow. He had used the simplest negotiating tool in the world to persuade the Russian flight-crew to take them to Anchorage: money, cash, lots of it. The Captain had weighed up the offer; the request was obviously an illegal procedure, but his flight crew hadn't been paid in three months and there was a lot of money on the table, American dollars too. Besides, the Russian Military were in such chaos that no-one would ever know.

Even so, he had still been doubtful, especially as the young, blond man with the intense, glittering blue eyes had insisted on taking his own armed crew on-board.

"Why do you need them on-board?"

"So you won't double-cross me for the money and kill me."

"How do I know you won't kill or double-cross me in turn?"

"Because you have my word on it."

The pilot had weighed him up. His word eh? He appraised the young stranger's hard gaze. He was a man who relied on his judgement of character – his judgement was that this young man's word was good.

"And you can take that bleedin' look of yer face. Which one of us is the prisoner here?"

In the kitchen of a secluded L.A. villa, Walker stalked about, rigid with annoyance, whilst James grinned evilly at him. He flicked a look at her, Jesus, where had he seen a smirk like that before? – yep, on the face of that fucker Sark! What had she done, taken lessons off him? He thought of the bind he was in, on the one hand in hock to Arvin Sloane and on the other facing a pissed off Sark … _Give her back or torturing you to death will become my hobby._

_Hell, I've done a lot of naughty shit in my life, but I don't deserve this crap!_

To sprinkle shit-flavoured icing on the turd cake he was stuck in L.A. – never his favourite city: _too fucking sunny, and all those gits on roller skates, what? – they can't fackin' walk? _– and was surrounded by a crew who weren't his but were Arvin Sloane's.

Who was the prisoner here? He hadn't admitted it to Dodgson, he hadn't fully admitted it to himself, but he was beginning to feel it was him. He knew he didn't have control of the crew. It had become a battle of wills between he and Sloane's L.A. operative, a pretty caramel skinned lovely with the dead eyes of a killer: 'Allison Doren'. If he issued an order, the crew cleared it with Doren first and she just smirked at him because of it. It was a battle of wills, an authority turf war, and he was losing it. And when he finally did lose he knew that an avalanche would come down on his ass and that he or Dodgson or both of them would wind up dead as Doren stamped her authority on the situation by making an example of them.

He didn't like the way Doren kept looking at Dodgson, smirkingly measuring her up, itching to take her on. It was almost as though she resented her for something personal.

He knew he should be concentrating on his own safety, but about Dodgson, well he felt fucking _responsible_.

He knew the only real thing protecting her was not himself but the fact that Sloane had wanted her alive to get the goods for him on whatever she had been working on. Walker knew that she had now finished – she'd drawn up the schematics on a piece of scrap-metal crap called The Telling - and he wasn't sure how much time either of them had left. Even if they both lived, Dodgson would be swept off into Sloane's and Doren's clutches, and no-one would ever know what became of her until in about fifteen years, maybe, a skeleton got washed out of a riverbank somewhere.

He needed the cavalry to get him out of this one and he didn't have the cavalry's number.

He knew that Doren was absent right now. He flicked a look at the kitchen doorway, he might as well do the rounds in an effort to find out what the hell was going on.

"You!" he pointed a finger stiffly at James, "just sit there and quit yer bleedin' grinnin'!"

James just shrugged indolently. "Consider grinning quit."

Walker stalked out, muttering something that sounded like _friggin' Doren_.

Watching him go, James was fully aware of just how tenuous her position was. She was damned sure Walker would never kill her, but she was equally sure that it was no longer his choice; Sloane's lieutenant, the woman known as Allison Doren, was in charge and would kill her as soon as she could.

_What am I saying? - the 'woman' known as Allison Doren? More like the 'bitch-troll minx' known as Allison Doren!_

James acridly recalled one of their earlier 'conversations', with Doren's hooded gaze sneering down at her as the woman leant against the kitchen counter, wearing skin-tight leather and waving a cigarette around like it was a magic wand.

James had known Doren was eventually going to kill her and hadn't demeaned herself by begging.

"He's quite something, isn't he?" Doren had drawled after a while of staring.

James had ignored her.

"I meant Sark," Doren had prompted, knowing that Sloane had stolen James from Sark.

James had shrugged, even though she'd been hit by a genuine surprise. _Sark knew Doren?_

"Surprised I know him?" queried Doren, "I know him well – _very_ well." At that last her voice took on a licentious tone, there was no doubt what she was implying. "Yeah, we're _partners_," Doren had let the inference dangle in the air. "That bond never really goes away does it?"

"No, and neither does the smell. Wondered why he always bathed in Clorox."

_Jeesus, Sark had … and with that fucking skank?_ James had felt a flare of wrath.

"Sloane's told me to keep an eye on you." Doren managed to make it sound like a threat.

"What a bastard eh? - giving you difficult orders like that. What does he think you are, intelligent?"

"I could kill you quite easily."

"Sure, if Sloane didn't need me. Oops damn! That cunning plan foiled again hey Allison?"

"You won't have Sloane's protection forever you know."

"Yeah, but hey, may as well die as I lived, right? – obnoxious."

Allison had taken an enraged step towards her.

"Uh, uh now!" James had wagged a finger, "don't forget … Mr Sloane _needs_ me." Allison had paused uncertainly in mid-stride, James had taken full advantage. "Don't fuck with me Doren, you're gonna kill me anyway. You're one of those sad bitches who needs to be in charge precisely because you know you're not. You'll kill me just to prove to yourself that you are. You're just a secretly scared schoolyard bully, I've met enough of them in my life to know one when I see one."

Allison had glared with the look of an enraged dog straining at the end of a length of chain. The length of chain was Sloane's order not to kill Dodgson. James knew that as soon as her usefulness to Sloane was ended, that Doren would kill her to shore up her own sense of authority.

Well, James thought Doren might get her chance sooner than she knew. James knew she'd helped build a thing called _The Telling_, and from Sloane's bliss at having the schematics she sensed that her usefulness might well now be over. He'd gotten what he wanted.

She almost wished she had that sick bastard Sark back.

Sark.

She had not really allowed herself to think about him since she had been captured by Sloane. There had seemed little point. She had warned him about Echelon, but really, did it matter? He wasn't going to come and get her, after all, she'd given him no reason to. Besides, even if he did … well, was Sark's frying pan any better than Sloane's fire?

Irina cruised L.A.. She was still surprised at what she was doing – about to engage in a cash for Rambaldi artefacts exchange with one of the most dangerous operatives she had ever met: Arvin Sloane. And doing so in the very city which held the greatest discomfort for her – Los Angeles, the place where she'd been held for months on end in a glassed-in box in a basement.

Anyone else would have termed the physical circumstances of her incarceration cruel and unusual, the CIA had called it 'custody'.

She had set up the mechanisms for the exchange yesterday at a beachside café with Sloane; she felt confident that all would go well, anyway at least confident that if Sloane tried to screw her over then she could more than screw him back.

She recalled yesterday, sitting across the table from her Sloane had looked like he'd died and been brought back, several times. Irina reflected that there was quite a difference between re-animation and resurrection, with resurrection a person was bought back to life, with re-animation a body was simply juiced up to keep moving – it's spirit absent, or else evicted by something else. Arvin Sloane had looked like he'd been re-animated.

"So you are willing to sell them?" 

"_More than willing, and for a price I feel is quite reasonable." _They had been discussing the sale of Sloane's Rambaldi collection. _"I have spent my life in pursuit of the great mystery of Rambaldi, and now … well I feel I may term it instead that I 'wasted' my life. I do not wish to look upon his artefacts again, I would simply be reminded of the evidence of my failure to live life."_

Irina wouldn't have bought that little speech for a second prior to Emily's murder, but sitting there she had looked across at Sloane and thought his statement was true. Well, true for now. Better make the deal then, she had decided, while he was still willing to offer one, before he changed his mind and decided that a fitting memoriam to Emily was not to abandon his Rambaldi pursuit but to fulfil it.

"And your price?" 

"_Three hundred million. I think you'll agree, hardly exorbitant."_

"_Hardly exorbitant? It's cheap. Why so little?"_

"_I want rid of them. I want them gone so I see no reason to set a price that would encourage haggling or delay. In the parlance of the market place Irina, I'm offering you first refusal."_

"_I can have the money available for transfer by this time tomorrow. Can you have the artefacts ready?"_

"_They are ready now."_

She had felt an unsettling frisson at his words …_ they are ready now_. To her, the Rambaldi pursuit had been an almost abstract endeavour really, despite all the killings and deception. But … all those artefacts were real. Rambaldi was real. Irina had felt a chill, as though she had entered a refrigerated chamber, entered a place were the atmospheric pressure was quite different.

"_Arvin, what assurances do I have that you won't double cross me?"_

"_Because you will kill me if I do." _

Damn right asshole! 

Alone in her rented car Irina killed time before the meet by slowly rolling through one of the more mundane suburbs of the city, one that would go totally unmarked on any Homes of the Stars' map: she had not picked it at random, she knew it was where Jack lived. All those years and she'd never really lost track of him, she'd always known where his home was, well where he dwelt. She doubted that Jack had a 'home' anywhere.

She twitched, angry at herself.

What the hell did she think she was doing, driving round the streets, circling Jack's house? She was like some teenage girl in her dad's car, cruising past the house of a boy she had a crush on and hoping to casually see him! What was she aiming to do? Park up, knock on the door and ask him out for coffee? He'd held her in captivity, he'd been ready to have her executed, she'd only gotten away in Stuttgart by the skin of her teeth. And yet …

She pounded her hands against the steering wheel as she drove.

Goddamn Jack, sometimes I wish I'd never met him! 

Besides, it wasn't that she didn't have enough else on her mind right now, she couldn't afford to go thinking about Jack!

The car slowly picked up speed and took her away.

From his lounge window Jack looked out and saw a car that had been cruising past slowly pick up speed and carry its driver away. Something about it held his attention, the female driver had been somehow memorable.

It couldn't be, could it? 

He shook his head, of course it couldn't be, not even Irina was that crazy. He'd held her captive, he'd set her up for execution – his mind veered away from that – and as for Stuttgart, well … Jack's mind veered away from that too, whatever he had done in Stuttgart it was over now, he wasn't going to question his motives on it.

So why would she come to him? Besides, what could he have done if he ever did meet her, flag her down and ask her in for coffee?

He picked up his briefcase and straightened his tie and smoothed his hair, he had an op today, taking the di Regno heart to a drop-off, no doubt to be picked up later by a third party and transported to the CIA's secret holding area for its own Rambaldi collection. A task Kendall had suddenly given him, hardly difficult, but even so it was still quite enough on his mind – there was always that sneaky bastard Sloane out there - he didn't need to go spiralling off thinking about Irina. He did think about her though, there wasn't a week - no, make that a day – that went by when he didn't. All that time, all that bitterness, and he still knew in his heart of hearts that no matter what, he could never wish he'd never met her.

He didn't know what he would do about her. After well over 20 years, he supposed there wasn't much he could do. Time was running out, maybe it had already ran out?

He left the house, jaw set.

_Rambaldi_, he thought, _what a load of shit._ _What a load of damage it had caused._

Jack didn't know where the CIA's secret Rambaldi stash was, yet. But he'd find out. And when he did then he thought he might just bomb the crap out of it.

In the Rotunda, Vaughn watched Sydney. He almost felt like a stalker. He recalled the recent private conversation he'd had with Kendall, a 'request' that he spy on the Bristows.

Vaughn had turned him down flat on the spot.

If the CIA wanted to spy on his colleagues, then they'd have to find someone else to do it.

But the situation still filled him with a discomfort. The idea that the management thought that Sydney and Jack Bristow might even _need_ to be under secret surveillance …

Jack Bristow's words filtered through his head … _Vaughn's opinion is irrelevant _… _you are a boy who is just not good enough for my daughter _… He felt a spasm of resentment, he would have been a saint not to.

He stared over at Sydney, who neither noticed nor looked back, the story of their lives these days.

With a painful spasm his mind veered back to Sark.

Was Sydney allowing herself to be lead astray over Sark? Was Jack Bristow playing one of his convoluted double bluff games – claiming that Sark was a double-gamer - that could end up getting Sydney into trouble?

He considered it. If he did 'investigate' privately – not for Kendall, but for himself - and found anything, then if he _had_ to tell Kendall he could skew the intel to leverage cover for Sydney … but for Jack Bristow?

Who the hell was Jack Bristow really?

The guy had worked for SD-6 knowing they were the enemy, Sydney had been tipped into doing the same by tragedy, but Jack Bristow had been different. Who the hell could trust a double-gamer like him?

Vaughn felt resentful, and then guilty for feeling resentful, but Jack Bristow and Sark were two men who were far too much alike for his tastes, two men whom he sensed dismissed him and who with their impersonal game-playing but very personal agendas essentially posed a danger to Sydney. They were like two Cornish ship-wreckers, coldly laying afire false beacons to lure a trusting boat into treacherous waters.

He looked over at Sydney again, pondering.

Jack Bristow wasn't the only one who could utilise a passive tracker …

Thirty thousand feet above, Sark gave a cold, narrow smirk and leapt out of a plane. A HALO jump, High Altitude, Low Opening, oxygen supply necessary, special suit on. As the freezing air whistled past him he had time for one flaring thought at something James had once said to him: The James Bond of Bad Guys?

If she ever found out about this, she'd never let him live it down.

At the burnt out Dacha, Sark's action-orientated mind had skidded about under him like a car on ice, and then protected itself by getting traction in reverting to what he was good at: planning. They had to be somewhere. He'd contact everyone he knew. He'd find them. He was going to offer a _very_ big reward. And when he found them? When he found them he was going to make Arvin Sloane wish he'd never fucking met Mr. Sark!

As he and his crew hurtled back to Moscow, Sark's mind had digressed down angry alleyways. _I'm going to beat the crap out of that git Graham Caplan, just for the hell of it! Caplan? More like Graham CRAPlan! _He had snarlingly remembered James relating how she'd asked for divorce but _Crap_lan had refused – _you'd think someone was holding a gun to his head, making him stay married_ – well he'd hold a gun to his head alright, he'd –

And then several large pieces of a puzzle had aligned to reveal a proper picture in his head.

… _you'd think someone was holding a gun to his head, making him stay married … You know I once got interviewed by the NSA? … they were just tellin' me that with my line of work and such that I might be approached by the Russians or enemies of the state or somethin'…_

It had burst upon him, Graham Caplan was a Russian spy! Sark's mind had raced over everything he knew about Russian strategy where sleepers were attached to specific partners and came up with one exultant thought: they'd have chipped James without her knowing – all he had to do was find out the tracking signal and then he could find her!

He had done just that.

Falling through the air, totally out of control, Sark had never felt more _in_ control. He felt calm, sure, determined. He knew what he was doing and he knew where he was going. He was going to track James Dodgson down and … well, he'd figure the rest out when he got there.

And okay, so it was L.A., home of the CIA and … _home of Sydney Bristow …_

Dammit! Right now he did not want to be thinking about Sydney! In fact, sod Sydney and Irina! His was his own destiny! He was going to make it turn out his way!

Knowing there was no-one there to witness it, Sark – like a schoolboy who knows no-one is watching - abruptly turned tumbles as he fell through the air, alive to the sheer joy of freefall. Knowing there was no-one there to witness it, Sark felt safe to deliver a full-throated _whoop!_ of wild exhilaration.


	32. Chapter 32

**Chapter 32: Mandoble** - _a light slash of the point delivered by a flick of the wrist._

"_Gee Syd, who'd a figured Graham Caplan for a Russian spy?"_

Marshall's voice flared loud in Sydney's ear as she ran through the darkened woodlands toward a secluded L.A. villa. The Russian connection had been unearthed when she'd gone over old ground on the 'Caplan' case. She knew Dodgson was connected with Sark, and if she found Dodgson, she might find Sark. Sydney had gone after the only lead left, Graham Caplan. Checking his phone records, she'd spotted an anomaly and had gone back to kick the truth out of him. The man she now termed SpyHubby had coughed to it all. That he was a Soviet sleeper. That Dodgson was a mark, but didn't know it, and that she was chipped by a tracking device.

She'd had a fight with Dad, who'd told her that she wasn't chasing after Dodgson.

"_Sydney, you are already under suspicion regarding Sark, I can only protect you so much, you are not chasing after a woman who is connected to him!"_

Sydney loped on with Marshall squawking in her ear. Well, Dad was off the radar now on one of his stone-faced covert ops, and what he didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

Looking for help she'd cornered Vaughn. It had not gone well.

"_I'm not helping you go against orders Syd! I'm not helping you go haring after that woman."_

"_Why not?"_

"_Because Kendall is already on your back.'_ Vaughn had looked almost pained._ 'You don't need more trouble!"_

"_Trouble? This is about rescuing an American citizen! This is what we do!"_

Vaughn had almost flinched, as though steeling himself to say something he'd much rather not.

"_No Syd, this isn't about you finding her, it's about you finding Sark. The woman's connected to him. Find her and you find a lead to him and you know it."_

She had felt stunned. Truth was, she had never thought Vaughn had that much insight. She had attacked out of fright.

"_That's bullshit Vaughn. What are you, paranoid? Scared I'll run off and leave you for someone else?"_

Vaughn had looked stricken, and as she ran on through the woods the memory of his hurt expression flooded her with a terrible guilt. She shook it out of her head.

She had wondered who else she could ask?

"_Marshall, your hands are shaking. If you don't want to help me, then you don't have to. Honestly."_

"_Oh, uh, nuh. It's not that. It's er … I gotta date tonight. One of the visiting East-Coast Analysts … Carrie?"_

"_What? An actual girl?" _

"_Yeah, I know."_

Marshall – the only person she could think of who would help her. Marshall – a scared, socially maladroit science geek who was a man of unimpeachable morality, great loyalty and would always do the right thing. He had agreed to help her straight away, she had saved him from Suit and Glasses once, and that was all Marshall needed to know. Besides, Sydney was going out to save a girl who had once been in his Quatzecoatl class … He had easily helped Sydney locate Dodgson, hacking into Soviet systems and extracting the information to track Dodgson. Sydney had taken it as an omen when the woman's signal showed up as being in L.A..

Recalling Marshall as she loped along in the dark, Sydney felt vaguely sick at it all, because she wasn't at all sure that what she was embroiling him in _was_ the right thing.

Using night vision goggles she orienteered her way through the woodland, effortlessly loping along little used animal tracks; all in black. Combats and a close-fitting top, combat boots on, her small backpack fitted snugly over her shoulders. She was aiming toward a secluded, upmarket villa in thickly wooded grounds: if you wanted to keep someone a prisoner, it was a good place to do it – there was room for plenty of guards. She had parked up in the dark, off-road a mile away from the estate concerned.

Marshall had fallen silent in her ear.

"Mountaineer to Black Kitty," she whispered as she ran. Silence in return. "Black Kitty?" Silence again. "Marshall?" She stopped, pressing her earpiece to her. "Marshall? Come in? Remember, 'Black Kitty' is _you_?"

Her earpiece burst to life again and she winced slightly at the volume. "Oh yeah, right! Gee Syd, this is kind of exciting – in a scary way. Er I'm not breaking the law here am I? Because my mother says she couldn't go through it again, not after my father and those sheep - "

"Marshall, you are not breaking the law, you are merely utilising the CIA's intel facilities for a deep covert op." She set off again, her breathing unaffected by her loping jog.

"This isn't a Black Op right? Because I don't want to do - "

"Marshall, it is a _grey_ op. Now, did you get anything on that address?"

Marshall, crouched over his desk back at the mostly deserted late-night Rotunda, filled her in; he may have been a nervous wreck with people, but show him a computer system, any system, and he was instantly it's new best friend. Now Marshall was concentrating on the house the tracker signal pointed her at; it was rental, on a short lease to a Mister Ormond Sacker – Sydney almost snorted at Sloane's pretentious pseudonym – and had the usual security. Perimeter fence, surveillance cameras.

"Any of those fully loaded extras these world dominating maniacs love? Minefields? Laser beams? Body heat detector triggering poison gas trap?"

"Nope, probably just the usual array of thugs with machine guns. Nothing you can't handle, hey Syd?"

_Nothing I can't handle._ She felt herself reel slightly as she ran, as though momentarily hit by low blood sugar dip as the reality of her situation interjected. _I'm on the way to single-handedly face down, without any proper back up, Arvin Sloane, a bunch of heavies, possibly also Sark_ – her mind swerved away from that thought. No, not Sark. He probably wasn't here anyway. She wasn't ready to deal with Sark. This was just the preliminaries to getting one step closer to Sark, that was all. She still had plenty of time to think of what she was going to say and do when she did meet him. She had to get Dodgson first and then, maybe, she could find Sark. It was okay, she didn't need to panic, Sark was for another night and –_ goddammit – maybe even Mom's here, and I can handle it? I'M COMPLETELY UNSANCTIONED! WHAT AM I, CRAZY? _

She ran on, mentally diverting herself.

"How did your date go tonight?"

"Terrible. We had fish. I sweated. Freakishly."

"Tell her it was food-poisoning, you'll be fine."

"Er … Isn't that lying?"

"No, it's 'dating skills'."

"The fish thing was terrible. It was sushi. I kept dropping mine on the floor." There was a pause. "You can handle this, right Syd? I mean, are you sure you don't want me to tell Vaughn or anyone?"

Sydney had a coughing fit, stumbling to a halt, bent forward at the waist, hands propping her up on her knees.

"Syd? I mean 'Mountaineer'! Are you okay?"

"Sure … just … swallowed a fly. Don't worry about me." _Tell Vaughn? Just how much worse would it have gotten?_ "I'm okay Marshall. Don't call anyone for back up. Anyone! Got that?"

Marshall sounded doubtful but willing to go along with her. "Sure Syd."

"Okay Marshall, I'm now switching to radio silence for security reasons." She gratefully clicked her earpiece to 'off'. Not only did it kill the volume but also it stopped Marshall from asking any more uncomfortable questions.

Still bent over, hands on knees, she felt ever so slightly faint at the prospect ahead of her.

Could she handle it? Well, she knew what she couldn't handle, she couldn't handle any more uncertainty over Sark. She knew full well she had failed to even try to capture him in that stairwell in Stuttgart, and that meant that her issues with Sark were messing with her head. She needed to get herself sorted out about him and get fully back in the game, because if she were stumbling along, hobbled by her uncertainties, she was that much more likely to get killed.

She focussed her mind and drove it forward at the problem. She went over her game-plan: through the perimeter fence, sneak around the grounds, case the place, extraction of Dodgson if possible, retreat and call for help if not.

She loosened up and then started moving forward. She was going to get away with this. She was Sydney Bristow. She was the best damned field agent this side of an alternate universe. And then she tripped flat on her ass.

_Goddamn tree roots!_

She looked back accusingly at what had tripped her. Oddly, it didn't look like a tree root, it looked like – an arm. A dead arm attached to a dead body. She cleared the light covering of leaves and soil and saw a guard. A guard with a nice, neat bullet hole straight to the temple.

Crouching in the dark, vested up, black cap on to hide his blond hair but with stray curls peeking out over his ears and at the nape of his neck – _okay now I really need a haircut _– Sark scoped exactly the same villa from the vantage point of a slight rise. He was inside the perimeter fence, having neatly snipped his way through it after having first dealt with the electrical current. With his night vision lenses he could see the guards moving about below, they were slightly lackadaisical, not expecting trouble.

He gave no thought to the two men he'd already killed that night, long range patrol shot dead with a silenced sniper rifle and left to rot where they fell in the woods.

Sometimes there were advantages to a lack of introspection.

He'd fallen to earth earlier in the day and made his way to a private lock-up where he kept a stash of necessary equipment: weapons, surveillance gear, money, clothing. All shrink-wrapped against any possible damp. He had chosen one of his signature black suits for the mission. Combat gear made sense for crawling about in the woods, but if he got off the estate and into civilian territory then dressed as a pseudo-soldier he'd have a sign saying 'arrest me' flashing above his head. His transport was a rental car he'd parked a mile away.

He continued scoping the grounds, ticking off which guards he'd kill and mercilessly calculating the order in which he'd kill them. Dead men were neither here nor there to him, they were just so many pieces which had been eliminated in the course of his game. The ends justified the means, sometimes they had to, like it or not.

He knew that the 'ends' was James. He refused to focus on her though. He wasn't going to be de-stabilised by that sense of seething resentment he got when he even thought of her. He felt it rearing within him even now, it's splintered edge working away at him, but he shut it down. Focus was everything.

He scoped in on movement below, timing the guards and deciding upon his next hit: when one came round a corner of a poolhouse he could take him, the trajectory would spin him backwards into some bushes, covering the body. He did it and then, under cover of darkness, sprinted low out of the tree cover and across an open lawn, making for the cover of the poolhouse. He made it, rubber soled shoes making no sound against the concrete paving of the poolhouse patio. He skipped up the poolhouse wall, moving like a cat to reach the wires of the outside light, quietly snipping them before dropping silently back to earth.

He sensed the rough brick and stucco wall at his back as he crouched low in his newly created dark, the wall on one side, a jumble of folded deckchairs screening him on the other. He decided on his next target. The guard who patrolled to the rear of the house, making rounds every 12 minutes. The man passed over one vulnerable spot, a deeply shaded area near an outhouse. Hit him there and the dark would cover the corpse. Having started knocking off the guards he knew he had to do them all and do them fast before any of them became alert to why there were suddenly so very few others.

Sark waited another three minutes for the target to appear. Sark was flying solo, no back up, outnumbered, temporarily a sitting target and his heartbeat never got above 56 bpm.

The target appeared, blank eyed, bored, not concentrating on anything. Sark drew his sights upon him, the cross hairs settling on the man's forehead, Sark's finger resting in the curve of the trigger, the stock settling against his jaw. He attuned to his own heartbeat, intent on squeezing the trigger between two beats so his aim would be as still as possible: _track, still,_ _squeeze. _And then the man dropped before Sark got to the 'squeeze' part, tumbling into the shade which Sark had already earmarked for his corpse.

_What the fu? There's someone else here? _He swung his sightssearching for movement.He got it, a slight trembling in some bushes from a mere ten feet away.

_Shit, they're that close and I never even saw them? _Sark suppressed a flurry of panic. He drew an aim on the foliage – _fine, punch enough bullets in there and one of them is bound to hit, whoever they are, they're going down_. He steadied his aim and began to squeeze the trigger and then got that tingle at the back of his neck that told him that …

He rested his rifle against the stucco and leapt through the air, landing in a soundless pounce, pinning his prey on her back beneath him, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. A tangle of struggling limbs and threshing movements as she fought to drive him off before he, with hushed half laughter, got a hand under her CIA standard issue ski-mask and ripped it off her head. A flash of moonlight illuminated them both.

"Well, if it isn't Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. Out for an evening stroll, Agent Bristow?"

She surveyed him from where she was sitting, chained, handcuffed and manacled to a metal chair. "You know, if you just wanted a date you only had to ask. A casual invite for coffee is the usual way it's done."

He surveyed her from across the room where he, in turn, was strapped onto a gurney. "Can you tell me one thing?" he ground out. "Were you always this glib or was it something you've really trained up on since we last met?"

"I was always this glib. It's one of my many natural talents."

Jack and Irina locked gazes with each other – she in the chair, he on the gurney - both trapped, help captive and what were they still doing? – fencing with each other!

"How do I know this isn't some double-dealing? That you're not in league with whoever grabbed me and are just pretending to be a victim so you can get secrets out of me?"

"Oh Jack, if I wanted secrets out of you I'd just tickle you until you were sick."

There was a silence as each weighed up the other. Irina knew that Jack's inherent nature – honed by decades of deceptions both given and received – would ensure that he'd never be the first to start sharing intel. She'd have to speak first. "Okay, how did you get here?" she asked. She noted his closed face. "There's no point in not telling me Jack. If I was working against you then I'd obviously already know how you'd been caught, so you wouldn't be giving anything away. As I don't know how you were caught, you're sharing what might be valuable intel."

She watched Jack's expression shift a millimetre, she could see he understood the logic of it. Would he speak?

"I was grabbed on a covert transport operation," he said, "shifting a Rambaldi artefact to a third party who would collect it and carry it further."

"What was it?"

Jack watched her face, there was no reason not to tell her, after all if she was working against him, she'd already know that too. "The Rambaldi Heart, the one that was lodged in di Regno's chest."

Jack got his first big clue that Irina wasn't in on anything when she went white. Skin change of that nature was an uncontrollable physiognomic reaction. Irina was shocked, and maybe a little scared. Someone, somewhere was in the shit and Jack began to get the uncomfortable feeling it was them.

"What's the significance of the Heart?"

She shook her head, indicating the room about her. Jack got the message: they might be bugged.

"Who grabbed you, Jack?"

"Unknown. If I had to guess I'd say private operatives."

"Who set you up?"

They both knew they were referring to how and why Jack's transport details had been intercepted: to just who had betrayed him.

"Unknown. Though I suppose it might have been an electronic hack-in to records and not an inside traitor."

He received Irina's reply by way of her quirking smile: _don't kid yourself baby_. Irina knew full well just how hard it was to infiltrate CIA Rambaldi databases, she'd had to spend months in a glass cell just to get a single crack at it.

"What about you?" asked Jack.

"Got jumped in an exchange deal with Sloane. 300 million for Rambaldi artefacts. Sloane now has the money _and_ the artefacts."

"Sloane, eh? I was wondering when he'd come into this." Jack flicked her a glance. "Very unlike you to be so careless Irina."

"I'll take that as a compliment. Truth is, I found myself jumped by the biggest gang in America." She caught Jack's query, the arc of an eyebrow, and clarified, "operatives from the CIA." She knew from the way Jack flicked his gaze to hers that she had his full attention. "Yep, I think someone in the CIA asked Sloane to take you out - "

"And in return allowed Sloane to use the CIA to bring you in."

"Well, what do you know. 'Spies Are Us' are selling off Bristows: Buy One Get One Free." Irina's flippant tone faltered. "Do you think Sloane has Sydney?"

"She was securely in the Rotunda when I left her."

Both were aware that that meant nothing, both hoped it meant everything. There was a silence. The silence was interrupted by the door opening.

Jack appraised the person who walked in.

"Well," said Jack, "we would look surprised at seeing you - "

"Except that you never surprise us," finished Irina. She looked back to Jack as they both completely ignored Arvin Sloane, the man who had just entered. "There's something really important I want to know," she asked, still speaking to her husband. There was a quiet as she marshalled her words. "When I painted the dining room walls orange that time, did you really like it or were you just _saying_ you did?"

Pinned flat beneath Sark, Sydney completely froze. _Sark?_ It was so unexpected that she wasn't ready for it. All the things in her head, the expostulations, the pleadings, the confessions and the accusations – _are you the White Devil, what were you doing firebombing that church, did you cover for me in Kandahar, do you care for me, were you watching me on those tapes, you are the bad guy! _– couldn't get out.

That plus, staring up at him, for the first time ever in his presence she allowed herself to admit just how insanely attractive he was. Crazily so. It was as though Mother Nature had robbed a hundred people of their expected allocation of 'good-looking' so she could lavish the lot on Sark.

He was so beautiful, it was almost absurd.

When he had landed on her and she'd rolled over in a tangle of limbs and looked up, she had known it was him instantly. As she would know his distinctive voice anywhere, lying under him she realised it was the same with the stunning geometry of his face. One glance at one curve of one cheekbone – even in the dark - and she would know it was him.

"Sark?" it came out a disbelieving croak.

"Yes Sydney?"

His tone of polite conversational enquiry – completely at odds with their unorthodox position - rocked her even further. Her mind lurched, clutching for the nearest thing it could think of to say, however nonsensical.

"Dad sends his love."

She caught a flash of one of his trade-mark smirks as he spoke.

"Always knew he looked upon me as a son."

Sydney inwardly shrieked at herself. _Dad sends his love?_ _You couldn't think of anything better than that? You have a degree in English Literature but you couldn't at least crib some Jane Eyre?_ Above her she saw Sark's mouth twitch in amusement at her previous foolish statement and her mind reeled under the pressure of the moment. _This can't be happening - this is … Sark?_ She mentally slapped some field agent instinct into herself. _Sydney Anne Bristow, this is Mr. Sark goddammit, not Mr. Rochester_ – _PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER_ - _and where's your damned GUN?_

She jerked her head in it's direction, knocked from her and lying in the soil a few feet away. She got a hand free and lunged for it. Hissing, struggling to hold her down, Sark pinned her wrist down inches from it and wrestled her other hand down to the dirt, the rest of her held down by his sheer body weight. She had greater agility, and might have been even faster on the draw, but he had weight of shot.

"Get off me Sark, I'm not going to stop struggling until you do!" she jerked and twisted beneath him.

"Feel free," he panted, struggling to hold on, "I'm enjoying it."

Damn, now the bastard was laughing at her! She steadied her gaze, glared at him, took aim, and then without warning jerked her head at up him, trying to whack him with it. She caught him on the cheekbone and he snatched his head back, grimacing. Mouth compressed in anger he glared down at her for a second, his gaze a blistering blue, and then darted his head down at hers.

Time slowed for her.

Her pulse seemed to stop.

She saw the gleam of the moonlight glance off the curve of his cheekbone, saw the flash of his blue eyes as they seemed to generate an inner light of their own. She saw and then sensed his eyes remain open as his face closed to hers, felt the faint rasp of his mild stubble against her cheek, the soft nudge of his lips opening against her skin. Her neck arched up to meet him and she gave the slightest of gasps as the incongruous thought filtered through her drifting mind: _oh, he kisses with his eyes open_.

And then he bit her.

Not enough to break the skin, but quite enough to hurt. She gave a suppressed squeal of pain and hissed up at him, eyes watering.

"Well what did you expect?" He looked down at her with a tone of irked puzzlement, "that I was going to kiss you? If you will try to head-butt me Sydney, you can hardly expect me to just let you."

Sydney's mind was a jumble as she fought to collect herself. "Only girls bite!" she hissed, hoping it covered her confusion.

"Really? That's nothing, you should see my infamous hair pulling manoeuvre." He caught both her wrists in one hand, grabbed a fistful of her hair and slammed her head back into the dirt. He grinned down at her. "See? Told you. Now, question time. Are you by yourself Sydney or can I expect Agent Dixon to come hurtling out of those trees in your defence?"

Sydney glared up at him and tried to think it through. Would it be better if she lied?

"I'm not alone. I have back up! And they are not going to just let you hand me over to Sloane!"

She saw Sark grin down at her, he wasn't falling for it for a second. "You're lying Sydney, it took you too long to think of the answer, and if you did have back up you'd never say so and give away their element of surprise."

Beneath him, Sydney closed her eyes. Oh for God's sake! Why does one of the biggest bastards on earth have the face of an amused Greek god and the sexiest accent ever? 

Her gaze flicked open and she saw his eyes glitter with a sly laughter. "Well," he continued, "I can honestly say that at least I'm not planning to hand you over to Sloane." Sydney's eyes closed again in relief and she felt Sark dart in to whisper teasingly in her ear, "I couldn't, he's not here."

"Oh, you're hateful!"

"I know. What can I say? - sometimes even I hate me."

She felt him settle himself against her as though getting comfy on a sofa in preparation for reading a good book with a nice cup of cocoa and some teacakes.

"You're heavy!" she gasped. "You're squashing me!"

"So," he grinned, completely ignoring her, "having established that you're here alone – _why_ are you here Sydney?"

Sydney stiffened and felt her throat lock. What could she say? _I'm here for you …?_ With her mind reeling it took her too long to think of another answer and she saw him draw his head back so he could survey her for evidence of lying. Sydney's eyes instinctively cut away, all the clue Sark needed. She felt him shake her slightly by the hair, precursor to another head-slamming.

"Now, now Sydney, don't think up a lie, answer me: why are you here?"

Below him, Sydney fixed her fiercest scowl to her face, but the fight was going out of her. She told, strictly speaking, the truth. "I'm here for Dodgson."

She saw Sark blink.

She definitely saw Sark blink.

Puzzled, flustered, she spoke.

"So Sark, why are _you_ here?"

Sark looked down at the furious faced and hissing Sydney Bristow he saw beneath him – she still obviously resented and despised him, God knows why she hadn't shot him in Stuttgart - and wondered how the hell she couldn't hear the sudden snapping crack inside his head when his mind had practically exploded in his scull at her question.

_Fuck!_

Despite all appearances, Sark was assailed by confusion. And Mr. Sark hated confusion.

How many times had he fantasised about a situation such as just this – running across Sydney on a mission or bumping into her unexpectedly during 'down-time' somewhere, in some way being abruptly presented with a clean sheet upon which to make his mark? And now it had stunningly and unexpectedly arrived … and now he wasn't sure he wanted it.

All the resentments he felt for her, all the dismissals and rejections she'd put him through. And bloody hell, but she hadn't even done the decent thing and shot him in Stuttgart!

He closed his mouth and swallowed, which was not necessarily a good idea, as he realised he could still taste Sydney from where he'd bitten her: cinnamon and something vaguely like honey.

_Shut up Sarkey!_ - he ferociously berated himself – _You're not interested in how she tastes!_

And now there was James in the equation!

At the thought of James he abruptly rolled off Sydney, closing up against her, some shutter coming down. "Same reason as you," he replied to her question with what he hoped was a studied neutrality, his face shifting into an unreadable, polite expression. As he moved, the soil from the ground seemed simply to roll off him, Sydney suspected his clothing was impregnated with Teflon: to look at him you'd never know he'd gotten his hands dirty. "Despite appearances Sydney," he could hear his voice coming out clipped and curt, "I'm not quite Mr. Sloane's lapdog. He has kidnapped Dr. Dodgson, and I intend to get her back."

"Sure, because you kidnapped her first, right?" Sydney's snapped response gave away her tension - something was wrong. He'd rolled off her – almost looking guilty – the instant she'd mentioned Dodgson. She stiffened. She'd hit a nerve with Sark, and suddenly she wasn't sure it was a good thing. Sark and Dodgson? There couldn't be anything between them, could there? Between a lethal-cocktail of a man and an eccentric academic? That couldn't be, it was ridiculous! She come all this way, gotten all this far, and now -

Sydney's increasingly wild thoughts were interrupted by a vibration in her hip pocket. Sark was sitting so close to her that he felt it too. Sydney caught the sneering arc of his brow and just _knew _what he was going to say. "Oh shut up you perve! That's my _cell-phone_!"

Sydney's expression put the unvoiced question: may I answer it? After consideration, Sark nodded and moved away from her just enough to let her access the phone. She flicked open the clamshell to see the screen, but also saw the muzzle of Sark's Glock swing up into her face. He conveyed an entire sentence with the single arc of a raised eyebrow: _well you didn't expect me to let you answer unsupervised, did you?_

The screen showed the caller name. Sark could tell from the flash of her eyes that she was surprised. "I have to take the call, it's Marshall," she whispered. Sark raised his brows, querying _why_? She blushed. "He's my …" she stumbled for the word, "this is going to sound so stupid - "

"What? - he's your _boyfriend_?" Sark was aghast. First James and now Sydney? What did that little guy have down his trousers, a python?

"He's my off-site backup!" hissed Sydney.

Sark convulsed with silent laughter, falling half on top of her and half on the earth next to her. Sydney rolled her eyes and wriggled her arm free from under his weight – honestly, he could be so_ annoying_! "Marshall, it's me." She felt Sark instantly rest the Glock warningly against her cheekbone as he listened to the call with her, and whilst she was sure he would never pull the trigger she knew he was quite capable of using the gun as a cosh and knocking her senseless if she pushed it. She steadied her voice. "Marshall, it's kinda busy right now - "

"Syd! Weird stuff's happening!" She saw Sark's eyebrows draw together in puzzlement as he heard Marshall's alarmed interruption, his head close to Sydney's as he listened in. "The tracker signal – there's another signal boosting alongside it." Sark reached to his inside pocket and drew out his own tracker. "I don't know what's going on. It looks like some kind of countdown. And there's a word flashing. Looks like," Marshall tried to get his tongue round the circumlocutions of Russian, but he didn't need to, Sydney and Sark could see the word on the Sark's tracker screen in front of them, "looks like," fumbled Marshall -

"Looks like 'Endgame'," spoke Sydney calmly.

"Gee, Syd, You're really good, how did you know that from all the way over there?"

"Gotta go Marshall. Things are going to start running hot around here."

Sark was already kneeling up, his knees sinking into the vaguely damp dirt. "Three minutes," he croaked out, white-faced. "She's got three minutes? This is crazy. I knew about the Endgame protocol, but it wasn't a problem. They'd never apply it to her. There's no reason to!" His voice spiralled up. "She doesn't know anything! She's just a _scientist!"_

Sydney was astounded. Mr. Sark was on the verge of palpable hysterics? She felt a dislocated amazement, both at the astounding sight and at what it strongly implied: that Sark had feelings involved in all this. She felt herself drifting free of her moorings - _Mr. Sark did feelings?_ _That can't be, he doesn't know what they are!_ Sark continued to spiral into an uncontrolled panic. "This can't be happening! It's completely illogical! She can't be going to die! I - " Sark's voice yanked to a stop as Sydney did the only thing she could think of to get them moving forward: she slapped him. Once. Hard. Straight to the face.

He hissed, a snarling big cat. Evidently slapping Mr. Sark was something one did not do. His gaze targeted onto hers, she saw his anger crest within him and then … it subsided. It had been an almost frightening sight. His eyes had been lit by something within, something almost daemonic, but then he had held on to himself and he had not struck back. Part of Sydney's mind flittingly wondered if he had a thing against hitting women? He had hit her before, but that had been in on-mission, no-alternative, knock-down drag-outs …

Sark pulled himself together, interrupting Sydney's thoughts. He jerked his head in the direction of the villa. "Let's get to it."

They raced, bent low, over the lawn to the house; crouching low behind a raised parapet that fronted a terrace. A guard rounded onto the terrace, Sydney shot him down before he had seen them, using her CIA dart gun. She saw Sark looking at it askance.

"Well, it gets the job done," she said defensively.

"It's a _toy_. When will you CIA types learn that it's quicker, cheaper and more effective to simply _shoot_ people?"

"You know, you are one patronising bastard. Remind me of why we're doing this?"

Sark craned his neck to peek through the stone balustrade. "French windows, flimsy lock, that's our entry. You're doing it because you're a saint, I'm doing it," there was a slight pause, as though he were screwing himself up to admitting something, "because Dr. Dodgson is … important to me."

He sounded as though the last three words had been dragged out of him with a pair of hot pliers. Sydney looked at him, astounded. _Sark cares about Dodgson? What? - I'm too late?_ She took in his appearance and found herself flaring in a rage. "You must be the only operative I can think of who'd go on a pre-planned covert night op wearing an Armani suit!"

Despite their desperate situation Sark found himself biting back. "Well there's hardly a law against it!"

"And if there was you'd break it!"

Sark looked at his watch "One minute and twenty seconds. I don't think we can stealth it."

"Oh, fine! Let's just bust in on unknown numbers. You take the 30,000 on the left and I'll take the 30,000 on the right!"

"Well do you have any other ideas? And it's now one minute ten!"

They stilled and stared at each other. A woman who'd come on the most tenuous of excuses hoping it would eventually lead her to the man crouched next to her, and now that it had, didn't know what to say - and a man who'd come to risk everything for a woman who hated his guts and made him more angry that anyone else alive.

There was a single beat, and then without a pause Sark and Sydney leapt over the parapet, guns out, exploding through the french windows, not knowing what they'd find or what they'd meet.

_Author's note_: The '30,000 on the left and 30,000 on the right' joke was taken from the last ever episode of _Angel_. But hey, they essentially got the idea from _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_.


	33. Chapter 33

**Chapter 33: Mediatajo** - _cuts made from the elbow (faster than from the shoulder but not as strong). _

"Leaving us to stew, huh? That old trick."

"He always did lack imagination in interrogation."

Sloane had stood in front of Jack and Irina with that aimless smile on his face. The fact that he had quite openly stood there was worrying, because patently he didn't give a shit whether they knew it was him or not. Did he not care because he knew that at the end they wouldn't be alive to tell? He had left, they knew that next time he returned, the 'questioning' would start.

They each struggled against their individual bonds, Irina unable to reach Jack to untie him and Jack unable to reach Irina. Their breath came in annoyed gasps as they each quietly twisted and strained. Irina flicked a look across at Jack. "I can't believe you hated that orange paint."

Jack glared across at her. "You asked me and I told you. If you didn't want to know, you shouldn't have enquired. Besides … you knew perfectly well at the time that I hated it."

"How was I supposed to know when you never said? What am I psychic? I was supposed to _know_ that you wanted the brown paint? - which you only admit _now_, by the way, decades after the fact!"

"I did say so at the time!"

"When? We stood in that hardware store looking at the two colours we'd narrowed it down to and you said, 'which colour do you want, the orange or the brown?' and I said the orange!"

"Well it was obvious I wanted the brown. I said brown last so I wanted you to pick brown. Besides, who in their right mind has a dining room that's orange?"

"What? I was supposed to pick brown because you said it _last_? What kind of logic's that? And orange, I'll remind you, was very fashionable at the time and … and a very sensible colour for a dining room because it's … it's …" she fished around wildly, "it's _the colour of food!"_

"_The colour of food_ – that is a _reason_? Well if we're going to use that as the basis of our logic, why not choose brown? After all, it's got food named after it – _Fudge Brownies_!"

Irina glared at him, trying to think of a way to outflank him … "_oranges!"_

The two operatives glared at each other from across the room: trapped, at the mercy of a madman, in a situation from which either or neither might come out alive and arguing bitterly about Irina's choice of paint more than twenty years ago. Each held the other's gaze mutinously, and then in the same slow second, like a glacier finally cracking in a late Spring thaw, each began to roar with laughter.

Sark looked down, smiled serenely at Walker, and kicked him in the head.

Sark and Sydney had experienced a surprisingly easy time of it, most of the guards were already dead outside, those few remaining inside had been caught in a pincer movement by a Simon Walker who'd weighed things up, taken his chances and decided to switch sides to join whoever had turned up and not just wait for Sloane to kill him.

Sark moved swiftly down on James who immediately turned on her heel and sprinted for a door. He caught her, picked her up, and clamped her down onto the table-top.

"_GET OFF ME!"_

"Yep, still hating me I see."

Sark jerked his head and spoke over his shoulder to a Sydney who had just entered and was quickly cuffing the semi-conscious Walker and yanking her ski-mask down backwards over his head, blindfolding him. "Forty-five seconds Sydney, pin her down!"

"_What?"_ A screaming James jerked her head up at Sydney who swooped down on her, grabbing here. "I've seen a picture of you! You're CIA! _Why are you helping him?"_ She saw Sark twirling a scalpel between his fingers like a conductor's baton. "_Get away from me_ _with that thing, you maniac!"_

"Your husband is a spy for the Russians," Sydney spoke, trying to pin the struggling woman flat.

"_Graham_? He hasn't got the _imagination_ to be a spy!"

"Hold her _down _Sydney! Your husband is a spy for the Russians, he was a sleeper sent to keep tabs on you. They chipped you with a radio tracker which was why we were able to find you – and they also implanted you with a cyanide pellet which is due to go off in under a minute. We have to get it out."

He ripped her jacket off and yanking off up the sleeves of her shirt.

"Are you _crazy?_ That's the stupidest thing I've heard since … _ever!"_

Sark turned to Sydney. "The pellet implant's normally in the forearm, look for a scar."

There was a diminutive circular scar in James' inner left forearm, about the side of a large lentil.

"How did you get that?" Sark prodded it with the scalpel.

"_How the fuck do I know!"_

"For Christ sakes Sydney, will you _hold her down!"_

Angrily, Sydney slammed James forearm hard down onto the table.

"Ow! You _freaky bitch!"_

Without prior warning Sark plunged the scalpel into the scar, making a neat, short incision in James' arm. James started screaming for him to stop. Sark had no intention of stopping. Skilled with enough medical knowledge to perform full-scale field operations – on himself if he had to – he had missed all the major blood vessels. He inserted a pair of long-stemmed tweezers into the gap. His heart was hammering, his internal clock told him he had twelve seconds left. He was fishing for the target, not even fully knowing if it was there, beating off that growing inner clamour that was screaming ever more loudly: _I can't find it!_ _It's not here! _Then he found it, the thing that shouldn't be there. Round, hard, a pellet. He felt around it with the tweezer ends and got it.

"Five seconds!" screamed Sydney.

And then he lost it again. It was too slippy.

"Four seconds!"

Time seemed to dip into slow motion, Sydney's voice was some long, deep drawl of a recording running on slow-play, he looked up at the screaming James and knew what he had to do: he plunged three fingers into the cut and ripped the pellet out. A small blue plastic ball. He flicked it into a glass cookie jar that was open on the kitchen table and slammed shut the airtight lid.

All three of them looked at it a second later when the deadline ran out: nothing happened.

And then … SPLAT! It coated the inside of the jar with flecks of blue plastic and a thick, viscous liquid.

James stopped screaming and threw up.

The kitchen was a maelstrom of raised voices.

"You blond motherfucker, I am gonna _kill_ you when all this is done!" James was almost sobbing with shock - wet-faced with snot, tears and sweat - crouched over, holding her arm, whimpering and rocking to and fro.

"Fine! Just add 'saving your life' to the rest of the sins you hate me for! And you think your husband's too dull to be a spy? You should see her boyfriend," Sark flung and arm wildly in Sydney's direction. "He's got 'dull' down to such an art you'd think it was the western equivalent of Japanese flower arranging!"

Sydney's voice rose another notch. "Don't criticise Vaughn!"

"Why not? He's not even here to help you! You picked _Marshall_ as back up! Remember?"

Sark was on a frantic edge. He was having to deal With James' resentment in front of the audience of Sydney and having to deal with Sydney's wrath in front of the audience of James. He was a man deeply uncomfortable with emotions, and now he was having to deal with two outstanding sets of heightened ones at once.

For her part Sydney had felt an implosion of angry despair. Sark cared for this woman Dodgson, she knew it. It was obvious. They might claw and snarl at each other, Dodgson might even hate Sark, but Sark cared for her and Sydney could see it. She, Sydney, had left it all too late. Her fury was from fear and grief and anger: she'd lost him before she had ever really had him.

James angrily wiped her nose on the only thing she had, her sleeve, and gave a wet snort of harsh, unbalanced laughter as she took in the screaming, angry Sydney. "Glad to see you have this effect on other women and not just me!"

Sark heard the white hiss of anger in his head. "Christ, are you _ever_ going to give me a break?"

"Duh, _shot _me. Remember?"

Sark and James' match was interrupted by Sydney who was screaming something about Russia.

"Just answer the question!" she screamed, fists balled. "Are you the White Devil?" Sark nearly jumped on the spot. _What the fuck?_ Irina had _told_ her? Sydney screamed on. "Are you The Out Of Nowhere, Moscow crime boss?"

Sark gave an abrupt, sarcastic snort of laughter, derision born of sheer relief. "Oh,_ that _one."

"Don't be so sarcastic! You're making it really hard for me to like you Sark!" screamed Sydney.

"All part of his 'cunning plan'," spat a tear-stained James. "He's full of 'em."

"_Sark, how am I supposed to have any faith in you if you won't let me?_" screamed Sydney, ignoring James. "Look, Dad thinks you used Echelon to tip off the CIA about that church bombing, did you?"

"_What?" _screamed James._ "_A church _bombing?"_

"Not a church, it was the Vatican _Embassy_," Sydney reprimanded harshly.

"What?" James gawped at Sark. "The _Vatican_? You hit the _Pope?"_

"Not the Vatican!" screeched Sydney. "I said the Vatican _Embassy_ - in _Mexico_!"

"You bombed a _church?"_

"Oh for God's sake! It was the only way to get her mother out of prison!" Sark roared. He jabbed a finger at Sydney. "The truth is Sydney, that out of the two of us the only one who's ever broken into the Vatican is you! When you shot one of the guards!"

"_That is not how it - _" Sydney felt her outrage choke her. "Oh, you are lying, cheating and deception on a stick!"

Sark laughed, tilting his head back. "You forgot 'sex'."

"You're not _half _the man Vaughn is!"

"Considering trading up are you?"

"How could I trade_ up_ to you?"

"From the base-line of a little whinger I thrashed in a stairwell in Stuttgart? - quite easily!"

"Oh I forgot, you beat him in a fight, _just before you blew up the building killing scores of people!"_

"You _what?" _screamed James. "For Chrissakes Sark, is there _any_ place you haven't shot the shit out of?"

"I did it for her mother!"

"You did it for her _mother?_ That's a _reason?"_

"Don't blame my mother!"

"Hey! Don't snap at me, Miss arm-slicing, CIA Super Bitch!"

"I wasn't talking to _you_, I was talking to _him!"_ Sydney turned back to Sark. "And in Stuttgart you were going to shoot Vaughn through the head, even though you already had him on the ground! You were going to blow him away!"

"What? Oh, that does it!" snarled Sark. "I was going to blow him away? Well, we'll never know, will we? Because you ever so nobly shot the gun out of my hand, didn't you? What, couldn't you bear to shoot me?"

"Is that supposed to be irony?" screamed Sydney.

"Oh puhleeze," sneered James, "try to keep up can't you, Little Miss CIA? That's _sarcasm_, he charges extra for 'irony'."

Sydney ignored her. "God, I think I preferred it when you were straight evil!"

"Compared to Agent Yawn - or should that be Agent Fawn? - you'd prefer me any way you could get me! Christ, what a boring bastard! His 'special field-skill' is speaking French! I speak French and so do sixty million French people, so what's so frigging special about that? He's an arsehole, a self-questioning little wimp, a man who needs you to save his life on practically every mission you both go on – how many times have you nearly been killed saving him? – and …" Sark scrabbled for the worst thing he could think of, "and he's _badly dressed!"_

"Vaughn and I have an adult relationship based on _mutual respect!"_

"Adult? _ADULT?_ You write his name on your CIA standard-issue pencil case and plaster your Situations Update folder with cute little slogans: 'The One True Pairing', 'We Always Find Each Other', 'Soul Mates'. As far as I'm concerned you can have him! You suit each other!"

"Well you should know, seeing how you bugged my house so you could watch us HAVING SEX!"

"I did _not_ _do that_, it was _Sloane!_" Sark roared. "And if you really want to know, I fast forwarded through those damned sex-tapes so I wouldn't have to watch!"

"What?" Despite her shouting, Sydney felt a slight stutter of confusion. "What? It wasn't _hot _enough for you?"

"Hot? _HOT_? I've seen hotter action watching field-mice shag on the Discovery Channel! Jesus! It took a year of mutual angst before you even _kissed!_ What were you waiting for, your virginity to grow back?"

"We had National Security to consider!"

"National Security?" sneered Sark. "If you two worked in the Library service you'd fret about leaving a gas-ring switched on when you left for work in the morning."

"_Vaughn is a wonderful lover!" _

"That fumbling bastard? The clue's in the name! Run it through a Spellchecker and it'd come out 'Michael Vague'! No wonder you have to get your kicks out in the field, dressing as a prostitute, whoring yourself out for the CIA! Christ! The things I've seen you dressed as, it'd make a pole-dancer blush!"

"I do not know what you're talking about! I dress appropriately for the Alias!"

"Appropriately? I've seen more conservative clothing on a Bangkok hooker! In fact with the fishnets, cheap nylon, hooker-wigs and just about anything red, these days I just look around to see if there's a spectacularly ill-dressed woman present and I assume it's you!

"Thanks for the life-advice … _Jedi Master!"_

"Don't stand on ceremony, call me Darth!"

"Darth what? Darth Sark? Darth Sarcasticus? Darth _Sardonicus?"_

"Oh please!" spat James. "It's obvious! - Darth _Bastard!"_

There was a ringing silence and then glaring at a nonplussed Sark, Sydney splintered into a howling, full-throated laughter.


	34. Chapter 34

**Chapter 34: Disengage **- _deceptively altering the line of attack by passing the blade under the adversary's point._

"That's us – the non-communication experts. Ask us to bug a conversation in Murmansk using a 1950's short-wave radio from Idaho and we can do it. Ask us to understand each other and we cannot." Irina looked across at Jack, and smirked. "Oh and by the way, sorry I gave you the slip in Panama. Not that it makes me the better field operative, you understand."

"Gracious of you Irina. Sorry I bugged you, already knowing you'd run. Not that it made me the better strategist, you understand."

She narrowed her eyes. "Just for curiosity's sake, when did you know I was going to run?"

"I always knew. It didn't matter. I knew I could pick you up later."

"Sure, just that when you tried, you _missed_."

"I could have picked you up _easily_ prior to your destruction of the tracker chip."

"Could have, but didn't, eh?"

"I prefer to see it as field-discretion."

"Oh. So it wasn't that you were powerless to stop me Jack, it was that you were _discreetly _watching me swing my ass out of the building?"

"Actually the CIA nearly caught you. Kendall wanted to send in the intercept team before you were off the grid. I stopped him. I argued that we should wait until Sloane appeared. It was quite an energetic debate, if I recall. Indeed it took so long that by the time it was ended, you had pretty much got away."

There was a silence.

Jack looked at Irina. With his innate tactician's subtlety he had, without compromising himself in any way should any recording of their conversation ever get back to the CIA, just admitted to Irina and to himself exactly what he had done in Stuttgart. He had let Irina go.

Irina looked at Jack. When she spoke her eyes were shining, from the distance across the room Jack could not tell whether it was with laughter or tears. She spoke, slightly hesitant, like a girl standing on a beach asking a guy for a date whilst stirring the sand with her foot.

"Hey Jack, assuming we get out of this … wanna come for coffee?"

"Just tell me, I really want to know. I'm all ears. No, really, I am. I definitely inherited my lugs from dad."

Sydney had moved out through kitchen patio windows onto the terrace and Sark had followed. He wasn't sure why he had, he just had.

Sydney still wanted to know whether he had used Echelon to alert the CIA that time in Mexico. But she was now asking rather than demanding, for the first time since, well, ever, she was approaching him as though he was a human being and not a piece of trash she wanted to scrape off the sole of her shoe.

Sark was almost disturbed by the switch in tone.

She was treating him with a friendly respect? She was trying to engage him?

Sark had wanted that from her for so long, and now it had come, he was almost unsettled at it.

He hadn't realised until she'd stopped just how steeped he had been in expecting an automatic enmity from her. He had been so used to it he had almost felt secure in it, and now it seemed to be changing?

He felt like a Viking mariner who steers by the heavens, only to look up one night and find the Pole Star gone.

He knew he should have liked Sydney's switch toward him, her seeming willingness to extend her hand – God knows he'd wished for it often enough in the past – but now it had come, he felt almost threatened. It took away one of his certainties: Sydney hates me. And it was so unexpected.

Was she just softening him up, so she could trick him and betray him?

In the nearby kitchen, Walker was still tied up and James sat at the table, leaning forward, compressing the cut in her arm. Keeping her in view, Sark leant backwards against the balustrade of the terrace, arms straight out behind him, palms pressed flat to the stone, legs elegantly crossed at the ankles, staring unblinkingly in through the kitchen doors at James. From the way she sat: staring ahead, crouched over, stiff, like a small mammal trying to be still enough to evade a predator, even with Sydney chattering away distractingly at his side, Sark knew James could feel the weight of his stare.

He felt a cool determination as he gazed unyieldingly at her.

_You are not getting away from me._

For her part Sydney was slumped against the balustrade, elbows and forearms propped on it, head hanging down, facing out across the darkened lawn and away from Sark, unseeing and unaware of his expression. She was dead beat from the kitchen bust-up. When she spoke, her voice was quiet.

"Look. Just tell me. Did you flare that warning signal off to Echelon?"

Staring fixedly at James, and unsettled by this new Sydney, Sark was startled by her repeated question. Dipping his head slightly he took a breath, playing for time. Faced with having to answer, he didn't know what to say. He was a creature schooled in secrecy, deception, in the art of getting and not giving. It was against everything in him to impart information unnecessarily and – goddammit – for _free_. He remembered something Sydney had said to him once on their SD-6 mission to Paris _… we're not friends and we're not going to be friends …_

"Sark." Sydney sounded exhausted. "Please, just tell me. Did you flare that warning signal off?"

"Yes."

He'd answered before he'd even known he was going to. Having done so, he almost felt a panic. He was giving away information. He'd been rained never to do that, he'd been trained -

At his side, Sydney expelled a breath she hadn't even known she'd been holding.

"Dad'll be pleased." She gave an aghast half-laugh. "God. What I meant was … he guessed you'd done it."

Sark stared ahead expressionlessly, still numbed that he had given the information. He felt the rough texture of the stone balustrade beneath his hands as he leant back. It was like sandpaper against his palms. If he pressed down hard enough, it would begin to hurt. He remembered Mexico City and began to press.

He spoke to Sydney tonelessly.

"He can hardly be pleased Sydney, but he might be able to accept it. I'm not proud of it. I'm not a hero, I never will be, but I have tried to step back from being a complete monster." He had said similar to James before now when flirting with her on the airfield in Russia – he sharply veered away from the memory - but this time it was a flat delivery of fact. He wasn't trying to get Sydney to like him, he was trying to get her to understand him. He didn't even know why he was speaking. He just knew that the more he spoke the more he felt _unburdened_, and the better he felt. He continued.

"Out of the two of us you're the heroic one. We're both in this game almost by accident Sydney. If our lives had been left alone you would have been something like a …" He was going to say 'doctor' but hauled himself up short; he knew about Danny Hecht. "You would have been something like a fire-fighter. Left to my own devices, I would have been raiding my way through Wall Street by now."

Sark didn't know it, but the truth was he wouldn't allow the possibility that he could ever have been anything better than ruthless and amoral. He was scared that if he tried for more and failed then he would be left with the recognition of is own lack and not merely the suspicion of it.

"Well, I guess truth will take time after all," said Sydney.

"What?"

"The truth, far from being '_out there',_" she said, "apparently it '_takes time'_."

He continued to gaze unblinkingly into the kitchen, staring at James. Sydney was unaware of it. When he spoke, his voice was almost distant. "I don't understand."

"My mother _earringed_ me to say '_truth takes time'_."

Sark raised his eyebrows infinitesimally. So Irina had given Sydney her signalling device? He reminded himself not to use his watch in future. The watch he only now realised he still wore. The watch he hadn't brought himself to discard. The watch he had not even considered discarding.

"Truth takes time, you say? Irina always did specialise in meaningless niceties."

So, Irina had essentially told Sydney nothing? Well then, Sark knew he wasn't going to change that state of play, not when he didn't have to. Sark knew he was Page 48 – whatever the hell that meant – but he saw no damned reason to let the CIA know it. Ever. They'd locked Sydney up for being Page 47, they'd do worse to him.

Sydney Bristow was Sydney Bristow, but she was still the CIA.

Sydney paused and looked down at the stone balustrade beneath her hand, taking in a breath, steadying her thoughts. Even gazing straight ahead of him, Sark could read the tell, he felt almost attuned to her: she was winding up for a big one.

"Sark, you once said that I was adept at reigning in my curiosity about Mom – that you thought of her almost as a mother yourself - "

He cut her off. "I won't betray Irina. I won't see her stuck in that glass cell again."

Sydney felt a painful squeeze around her heart. She had been overcoming her cowardice, bravely trying to reach out to Sark and had met this unexpected rebuff. She lowered her head and swallowed. Sark, like her mother, was so unknowable. Even standing right next to her now, he felt a thousand miles away.

"Sark, how old were you when you got yanked into this game?"

"Inducted full time? I was four. Into a thing called Project Birthday"

Once again the information had jerked out of him before he even knew he was going to give it. And once again that sense of lightness met him, as though he was dropping burdens he'd been carrying for far too long.

Sydney's eyes flew wide in shock. "Oh dear God! What do you remember of it?"

_Everything. But I shan't tell you that. There are things I'll never tell you, there are things I'll never tell anyone._

"Well I do remember the start," he drawled, choosing to make light of it. "I recall racing up the steps to a big granite building, feeing really happy."

"Why happy?"

"I'd heard somebody mention the word 'birthday'," he responded, "and I thought I was going to get a present."

Sydney gave out a gasp of horrified, shocked laughter.

The corner of Sark's mouth gave a quirk of amusement as he chose to urbanely smooth over the situation. "Well, you can laugh, but when your birthday's on Christmas day, you feel short-changed on birthday presents your whole life."

His delivery was drawling, amused. Sydney wondered what at, and then realised it was because he had just deliberately chosen to elegantly give her his birthday. There was a silence. She screwed up her face, abashed at pushing it, but angling for more intel.

"Would you mind telling me the year - " she was interrupted by her phone ringing. "Oh, it'll be Marshall!" Her hand flew to her mouth, "I forgot all about him!" She hurriedly answered. "Sorry I didn't contact you Marshall but everything's okay here now, I've got Doc … "

Sark poised, tense, wondering if she was going to reveal his presence – to betray him and give him away even now - when he heard her voice trail away. Shifting his head slightly, out of the corner of his eye he saw her face grow pale. The rest of her conversation was a series of ums and grunts until even they faded away and she closed the clamshell in a shocked silence.

"Dad's been snatched."

Sark blinked.


	35. Chapter 35

**Chapter 35: "In-the-Round"** - _fighting in 360 degrees, being attacked from all angles._

"What's your biggest fear, Irina? Hots, blunts, sharps, colds?" Sloane sounded like he was offering a choice of canapés from a tray. "Tell me and maybe I'll be kind and order my assistant not to use that one?"

"Me? – I'm scared of them all."

Sloane had carted Irina into a makeshift 'conversation' room, leaving Jack behind. She was strapped, lying half backwards, in a sort of dentist's chair. The chamber was staffed by Sloane and a svelte, blank-eyed, lethal-looking young man: a white-haired, pink-eyed Albino. Irina found herself speculating that he looked like Sark might have done, if Sark had all the blood and spirit drained from him.

"Irina, I would really rather not go through with this you know - "

"Ah, the old 'I torture you in sorrow rather than anger' routine." He mouth quirked dismissively. "I remember it well."

"There is no point to your holding out. Just tell me the location of the CIA Rambaldi hoard, I know you know where it is." Sloane paused as though about to take a different tack. "Irina, we both want Rambaldi back … "

_I want no such thing, you ferret-faced fuck._

" … so why do you care if I'm the one who achieves his return?" His voice became coaxing. "You and Sydney have helped me so much, whether you ever wanted to or not doesn't matter … we can share the glory."

Irina was glad they didn't yet have a heart/brain tag on her to monitor her responses, because at the mention of Sydney it would have spiked. Sydney was the reason she was refusing to give up the location of CIA Rambaldi hoard – the information she had and Jack did not. Sloane could not be allowed to get his hands on it and have all the Rambaldi artifacts, any more than the CIA could be allowed to get their hands on Sloane's cache and have all of them. When either party had the full quota they would realize they needed Sydney to continue, and that was never going to happen. That was never going to happen if Irina had to die to stop it.

"Oh, and did you pick Lab-Rat Boy here for that extra scariness 'Albino' factor? Because really, it works."

"Irina, you _will_ tell me. It is so unfortunate that we can't do this pleasantly." Sloane indicated for the young man to bring over the tray of 'toys' and the heart/brain monitors.

They tagged up the faintly struggling Irina.

The young man moved toward the implements and Irina felt a clutch of fear in her stomach. Despite all the times that she'd ever been tortured, hey, pain still hurt. And this time she knew there was no backing down or dealing. Her daughter's life depended on it. Her thoughts drifted as her consciousness began to cut loose from her body in a trick she'd learned, a trick to muffle pain.

"You've never had children have you Arvin?"

She didn't understand why her comment seem to cause the flutter of blinks across Sloane's face. She didn't know that Arvin was remembering Emily, a woman who'd had a child. A woman who'd be deeply ashamed if she knew what her husband were doing right now. So deeply ashamed she'd be, that he wanted to weep. But he knew that if he didn't do this thing, if he couldn't make himself do it and drag the information out of Irina, if he didn't find those CIA artifacts, then he could never bring Rambaldi back and thus he could never bring Emily back … Rambaldi didn't just have the secrets of eternal life, he had the secrets of _resurrection_ too …

"Irina," there was a desperation to his voice, "please don't make me do this. We can find another way."

Irina didn't even look at him: _there is no other way Arvin, because I'm not giving you what you want. You've never had any children, so you don't know. You don't know that you'll die for your child. And if dying means my sitting here and letting myself be killed by you, then I'll do that too …_

She knew what was coming.

She imposed her will upon herself. She delved into her circadian rhythms, sending herself deep into a waking sleep, severing the connections she felt to 'pain'.

All the tricks she'd taught Sark, all the tricks she'd never had the time to teach Sydney, all the tricks she wished she'd never had to learn for herself or to teach to anyone else.

"We need a base-line reading," said the young man. He spoke with a faintly metallic German accent. "A question we know we get the truth on, so we get the readings for that, ya? - so we know when she's lying about anything else. 'What is your favourite colour', something like that. But something we can verify her answer to."

"Irina," Sloane spoke pleasantly, "what is your name? Who are you?"

From deep within herself, just within reach of hearing him, Irina gave a laugh only she could hear and decided to tell the truth for once. That'd confuse the bastards.

"I am … Irina Bristow."

"YOU ARE NOT LEAVING ME WITH HIM! YOU ARE THE CIA! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO _PROTECT ME!"_

Sydney stared, grim-faced, down at the screaming James.

"Don't tell me my job. My job is to protect the national interest, which is what I am about to do. Right now, you are not my priority."

"The national interest? This is just about your father!"

"So what? Then you still aren't my priority."

"Are you saying you trust_ him?"_ James flung an arm in the direction of Sark. He stood slightly away from them, leaning against a wall, arms folded, ankles crossed, head back and jaw tilted slightly, watching them. Despite whatever he felt, he looked like a somewhat indifferent spectator at a tennis match. "You actually _trust _this guy?"

'Yes I do."

Sydney blinked. _Did she? _Yes she did.

James, hauled up short, gasping for breath, stunned. What? This crazy CIA chicka trusted Sark? And she fucking _meant_ it? _Since when did that happen?_

"He gave me his word on you and I believe him. He will release you at 12 noon tomorrow in L.A.. After that you will be clear of this business and you will be safe."

"Well if he's telling the truth, why doesn't he release me now?"

"Where to? Look about you. It's late and this estate is in the middle of nowhere. Sloane and his men still out there somewhere, ready to collect you and kill you. Exactly where do you think it is safe to release you right now? I'm leaving here on CIA business and you are leaving with Sark. It's the safest thing."

On hearing of Jack Bristow's captured status – his transport had been shot up, but his body had not been found – Sark and Sydney had immediately narrowed it down to two suspects: Irina or Sloane.

"It's Sloane, right?" Sydney's voice had held an edge of desperation. "Mom would never kill or harm Dad, right? You know her better than I do," Sydney had been in such a panic she never even felt the pain of that statement, "she wouldn't, would she?"

Sark had been utterly intent. "Your mother would never kill your father Sydney."

Sydney had felt a sick swoop of relief.

"He may not know it, _she_ may not know it," Sark had continued, "but I can tell you now, Irina never stopped loving that man." He had paused. "Sometimes Sydney, loves never die. People tell themselves they've stopped caring, that they don't love any more, that they _won't_ love any more, but they're just lying. You might give up on something, but some things will never give up on you."

Sydney had folded her arms across her stomach, leaning into herself, fighting her pain, too miserable to even consider Sark's words properly. "I don't know where Sloane is."

"Neither do I, but I know a man who does."

Thirty seconds later they'd had the still tied and blindfold Walker slammed up against a wall. They'd asked him for Sloane's whereabouts and Walker got the words out so fast they ran over each other.

"Idontknowforsurebutthere'sanaddressonlyabout twentymlesawayit'sawarehouse complexI'vegottheaddressandthat'sallIknow."

"Well," Sark drawled, "there's nothing like a bit of old-school loyalty."

"Sloane's a scumbag and we all know it," interjected Walker, sweating under Sydney's ski-mask, "no I take that back – he's a _mad_ scumbag. I've got no loyalty to him."

Sark could think of a dozen reasons why Walker would lie. Chief among them that Sloane did not know Walker had turned against him and so Walker could be treading a fine line, intending not to make an outright enemy of Sloane.

After all, that was what he would have done.

"I swear to you," Walker had said, almost as if he could hear Sark's thoughts, "I've told you the truth. I'm not supporting Sloane. That little rat-bastard was going to kill me, him and that bleedin' lieutenant of his: Doren. You'd be doing me a favour if you killed them both!"

Walker didn't know it but he had said the magic word, the one thing that would make Sark want to move on as fast as possible to curtail the conversation: Doren.

Sydney didn't know about Allison being Francie. For the time being, until he could control the issue, Sark wanted to keep it that way.

Walker gave them all the intel he could on location and manpower as regards the suspected Sloane address. Sark asked James what Sloane was working on Rambaldi-wise, he didn't want Sydney running in there, facing up to a Rambaldi weapon she had no concept of.

"The latest device was a bunch a nuthin'. It's just a load of Renaissance radio shack shit. Like some old telegram machine: it was junk."

"A telegram?" queried Sark. "From whom?"

"Who cares? The thing was designed and created centuries ago. Whoever it was who wanted to send a message, they're dead now, they're not alive to signal and they ain't coming back."

A slight gong went off in Sark's head. No time to pursue it. The problem now was Jack.

Sydney had called the intel through to the Rotunda. She did not mention Sark.

"What about him?" Sydney had nodded at the bound Walker.

Sark's face had taken on a frighteningly closed expression, Walker and he still had unfinished business.

James had spoken up quickly. "He saved my life." Sark and Sydney had looked at her. "Back in Russia, Sloane was going to kill me." James nodded, indicating Walker, "he stepped in and saved my life. I'd be dead already if it wasn't for him."

Walker's breath had come in short gasps from under the ski-mask.

"What will I do about him?" shrugged Sark, "consider the account cleared." He whacked Walker unconscious again.

A significant improvement on killing him.

Sydney was now readying to leave. 'Reluctant' wasn't the word to describe James' reaction.

"You cannot just leave me here!" she screamed, jerking a finger in the direction of Sark again. "He is just a _criminal!"_

Sark told himself he didn't care when he heard her words.

"Really?" said Sydney coolly. "Well he's a criminal who came here to save you from Sloane." Sydney saw James blink at this news. There was a silence as James, confused, tried to take it in. "So why don't you try cutting him some slack?"

Following Sydney's intel, a CIA team – including Marshall in case of Rambaldi emergencies - was already en route to Sloane's set up. Sydney was to follow them, using a fast car from the villa's garage. She had not mentioned Sark in any of her telephone dealings with the CIA. Sark had wondered if she'd only held off on mentioning him because she knew he was there – listening - and whether as soon as he was absent, she would phone the CIA again and betray him.

"I won't tell them you're here."

It was almost as though she had read his mind. But then in a way she had. They were both prodigies in the same field, they thought alike. She parodied something he'd said earlier. "Despite appearances Sark, I'm not quite the CIA's lapdog."

He had accompanied her to the garage, making an impromptu solo farewell party. Sydney was in her purloined car, engine on idle as she prepared to leave.

"Even if Vaughn asks nicely?"

Sark mentally slapped himself: _Fuck! Why did I bring that wanker into it?_

Sydney's heart skipped slightly, not because the mere mention of Vaughn's name 'made her heart skip a girlish beat', but because a part of her meanly hoped that the slight edge she had heard in Sark's voice was about her.

She couldn't stop herself from still having hope.

She mentally slapped herself: _Stop it Sydney! You blew your chances, he doesn't love you!_

"I don't care if he asks in French. I'm still not telling." She made her voice sound even.

The truth about Vaughn was … she hadn't thought about him once since she'd met Sark tonight. A lot of her confusions had been sorted out tonight, a lot of … _issues _… and one of them was that she did not love Vaughn. She knew it. She admitted it. Whatever there had been between them, if there had really been anything at all, it was over. It was only the decent thing to let Vaughn know it. As to what 'people' might think … did it really matter what 'people' thought? Screw 'people'. She and Vaughn were over; a dark part of her knew they should never have begun.

She'd only ever been using him to fill up the lonesome shaped hole in her heart.

"Sark?" He looked down at her, Sydney sounded strained, as though about to ask something she was nervous of voicing. "How will I find you again?" It put the unvoiced question: 'do you want to meet me again?

Sark answered it.

"You won't find me." Sydney felt a thump of rejection, the unexpected, painful jolt of miscalculating the last stair tread in the dark, and then … "You won't find me because I'll find you. I've built an illustrious career on being able to catch up with you, Agent Bristow. Don't think it's going to stop now."

Once again Sark was stunned to find himself say it. And once again he felt another ton of baggage slough off.

She gave a gasp of relieved half-laughter at Sark's words. She took off the handbrake and the car rolled forward. On an impulse Sark put his hand on the lowered window to arrest her. Something was pressing on his mind. Something he had to say. The words shot out before he could stop them. "Sydney, I'm looking to come in to the CIA."

"What? _Why?"_

Sark was equally startled. _What the fuck am I doing?_

"Sydney, I've got so many enemies, people could get killed just from standing next to me. If I make my peace with the CIA then at least I only have half my adversaries. Time to make myself less of a target."

… _could get killed just from standing next to me_ … He remembered who had initially said that to him and knew why he had just said what he had. You couldn't expect someone to spend a life with you, if you didn't have a life to offer.

"Try not to get killed Sydney, okay? Because I think I'm going to need a character witness at some point."

Sydney looked up at him, eyes round. Incongruously, she noted his hand on the window edge: big and square; honest, practical hands. She was surprised, why had she always imagined his hands to be long and elegant?

He crouched down, his head now at a level with hers as they looked at each other through the driver-side window, each somehow trying to speak without words.

Sydney forced a grin on her face, but it wasn't a proper grin because it kept wanting to wobble downward at the corners instead of going up. She felt a sudden, upwelling sadness. She had once imagined Sark as a cold, carved, block of marble. A living Kouros. But she had been wrong. Beneath the mega-tonnage pressures of his life, pressures that would have killed lesser men, he had somehow managed to stay alive, to stay human …

Sark's eyes and golden hair seem to gather every passing scrap of light. His expression was almost painfully open, flayed down to a raw honesty.

Sydney wondered if the expression on her own face was just as full of pain.

Their gazes enveloped each other.

She knew that Sark was alarming, he was mercurial, he was ferociously intent … _but he didn't hit me tonight when I hit him _… He was scary and alluring, and for all the fear and trepidation she should have felt right then … _instead I feel safe _… This was Mr. Sark, Mr. Ice-Water-Super-Spy, with his Rambaldi agenda and his ruthless attitudes … _and he's never tried to kill me, not once _…This was arrogant and sneering Sark … _but _ _it was so right_. But then the knowledge weighed on her, she'd left it all too late, there was someone else now: Dodgson. Sark cared about that woman even though she didn't seem to care about Sark. But … she remembered his words … "People tell themselves they've stopped caring, that they don't love any more, that they _won't_ love any more, but they're just lying. You might give up on something, but some things never give up on you." Who had he been talking about? … It was all just _too confusing_.

She readied the car and made to go. She had to leave before she started to weep. She could hear Sark's voice as he straightened up, steadying his hand on the roof of the vehicle. He sounded slightly husky, strained.

"Be careful Sydney."

She forced herself to speak, trying to keep her voice steady.

"I will."

"Don't get killed."

"I won't."

"Be safe."

She let the car roll forward a few feet and then called over her shoulder in a last, slightly shaky goodbye as she gasped back her tears, staring straight ahead, not looking at him.

"Sark?"

"Yes Sydney?"

"For the love of humanity … get a haircut?"

Sark stood in the dark and watched her go, keeping his gaze on the tail-lights until they were out of sight; just as she turned a last corner away from him he raised a hand in tentative farewell, even though he knew she couldn't see him.

Okay, so now he was completely confused! He had no fucking clue what he wanted! He was about to run the risk of his life and cut an entry deal with the CIA – which if it went wrong would see him in jail – and who for? For James … for Sydney?

No! I don't care for Sydney and I won't care for Sydney! 

He tried to slam down on the thought, but it was already too late.

Just what the fuck do I want? He shoved his hands in his pockets. Do you have any idea what you are doing Sarkey? He aimed a vicious kick at a perfectly innocent pebble and turned back toward the kitchen. 

What he saw there arrested him with a flare of wrath.

"What the hell do you think you are doing?"

James and a revived Walker were hunched, head to head, attentions riveted on Walker's cell-phone, where he was taking a call. James had evidently untied him so he could answer it. She motioned Sark to silence with an angry wave of an arm and a hushing noise. Sark stalked over, and shoved his Glock up under Walker's jaw.

"Oh will you just shut up and _listen_?" hissed James, returning her attention to the cell-phone. Sark found himself doing likewise despite his inner wrath_ … _and got straight back on the clock: it was Arvin Sloane.

"… so Mr. Walker, have the Wand and Dr. Dodgson ready for extraction. I'm sending a team over to collect. Be ready to go with them the instant they arrive, they should reach you in about 15 minutes. It is utterly imperative that you be out of the area and moving North, past the interstate, by midnight."

The three listeners looked at each other, puzzled.

"Look mate," Walker spoke down the line, angling for intel, "be ready to go in 15 minutes? Why is it so important?"

"I am not accustomed to being questioned, Mr. Walker."

"Yeah, so? I'm not used to being given the run around, but I get that from you all the time." Walker's tone hardened, this time with a with genuine anger. "So, once more with feeling: why is it so important?"

There was a silence from the other end of the line where a quietly furious Sloane was mentally signing Walker's death warrant; not that it mattered, Walker had quit anyway. Sloane spoke. "Mr. Walker, whilst ordinarily I wouldn't explain myself to you," – _no shit _mouthed Walker, "but I have decided to make an exception in this case if it will expedite you. Do you recall a recent 'incident' in Mexico City?" All three froze, Sark knew exactly what Sloane was referring to because he'd done it, James knew about it because she'd just heard of it, and Walker knew about it because he'd seen it on CNN. "Well if you don't want to be caught up in a similar conflagration at midnight, I suggest you follow my orders."

"Ask him where the bomb is!" hissed Sark.

Walker switched his attention back to Sloane. "So your going throw a great big firework show tonight, huh? Where?"

"Mr Walker. I find your sudden inquisitiveness quite annoying …"

Sark interjected whisperingly. "Ask him if he's got Jack Bristow!"

Walker kept his hand over the mouthpiece, "I can't. We're not supposed to know anything about that. If I ask, we're just tipping him off to the CIA intercept." He turned his attention back to Sloane, interrupting him, "Yeah, whatever, fine mate …"

"He's not as stupid as he looks is he?" whispered James, indicating Walker to Sark, "but then again, no-one could be."

Sark suppressed an almost shy grin – it was the first thing she had said to him in a long time that didn't indicate he was dirt beneath her feet. They tuned back in on Walker.

"… it's up to you mate, but I can tell you now, after tonight you'll have the CIA all over your arse."

All three caught Sloane's reply.

"What's left of them." There was a dark chuckle from the handset. "And now I believe it's 14 minutes Mr. Walker - be ready." He hung up.

There was controlled chaos in the kitchen.

"How can he have that weapon? The CIA have got it." Sark's English accent rang out clearly.

"He doesn't need the original weapon," James' Bayou drawl answered. "He had the plans for it, he knows how the technology works, all he had to do was build a modern version."

"Fuck that. We are leaving." Walker never was one for charity.

"We can't just leave, the city is going to fry!" spat James.

"Yeah, but without me in it!"

Sark and Walker took up arguments and discussions. James ignored them and moved to the white fridge door. She swept it clear, effectively leaving herself with a white sheet and then, tuning out the noise around her, she got to work. She mentally projected a map of L.A. onto it, and then in her mind marked out the interstate … _It is utterly imperative that you be out of the area and moving North, past the interstate, by midnight … _She was calculating: so the interstate must be the northern perimeter of the burn. If he's using max power that thing has a range of … which makes a radius of … which puts the epicentre about …

She turned to the still arguing Sark and Walker. "Say you two, Sloane goes for symbolism in his attacks. The guy's got a theatrical streak. Anyone know anything suitably symbolic in the…" she looked back at the map she'd projected, boosted up the magnification of the epicentre area, and called out the street area.

Sark stopped in mid sentence and looked at her. "That's only five blocks from the location of the L.A. branch of the CIA."

"You're not leaving here, you little Brit thug, until you've done helpin'!"

"Bleeding 'ell, alright then! I'm helping! See? This is me, 'helping'!"

The were in the garage, tearing the place apart, looking to fill a 'shopping list' James had drawn up. They were all painfully aware that Sloane's collection crew were due in under ten minutes.

"James, are you absolutely certain you can stop it?" Sark hurled mechanical equipment about, getting oil all over his suit. "My understanding is that once the neutron surge has started, there's no defence."

"Yeah, well our defence is that we're not going to let it get started. We're going to get there in time and switch it off."

"Huh!" snorted Walker, "if you can!"

Sark didn't say so, but privately he agreed with Walker, once the thing was even switched on it built up a charge that had to be dispelled, you couldn't just 'switch it off', you had to dissipate the power. He had explained this to James, but she had just shrugged.

"This is our mess, we have to sort it out. I built the prototype and you gave it to Sloane. We owe it to the world to stop this now. Besides, you said we couldn't have the area evacuated."

They couldn't, not only was there the problem of getting the civil authorities to take the matter seriously, but even if he pulled his Echelon stunt twice, Sark knew that if Sloane went to a maximum burn then the combustion area was too big, in the crush very few people would escape and James would be prevented from accessing the bomb to stop it. You couldn't evacuate a large city area in 45 minutes.

"I've told you before James, they don't have civil defence plans for a situation like this."

"Yeah they do," interjected Walker, "it's called 'everyone dies'."

Sark marked Walker's words. He was increasingly concerned that what they were trying to do, couldn't be done. He didn't think there was enough time, he didn't think it was even technically possible even if there _was _enough time.

They had swiftly discussed phoning the details in to the CIA and getting them to search and intercept before the bomb was switched on, but Sark had assured James that Sloane would have already switched it on, if he was going for the maximum burn radius he would need time to escape.

"And if it is switched on - with their 'special skills', what are the CIA going to do?" sneered Sark. "Speak French to it?"

They'd discussed contacting the CIA direct to evacuate just them. Well, James had; Sark had been indignant and Walker had snorted with contempt.

"Why should they have special treatment?" Sark had spat. "They'll have to take their chances along with everyone else."

It was easy for him to say, because at least he knew one thing: when he had seen the circumference of the burn, he had immediately calculated that it didn't include Sloane's place as indicated by Simon Walker, so Sydney was quite safe. So was Jack Bristow – well safe from the bomb anyway. He knew Jack was almost certainly with Sloane, for which he found himself oddly relieved, and that the little science geek Marshall who was also on his way there too. Sark found himself oddly relieved about that as well. Irina was probably okay, because wherever she was, he knew she was not locked in the basement of the CIA!

As for the general night crew at the CIA office, well they'd have to do what they were paid to do: risk their lives. James was aiming to risk hers without being paid for it!

She hauled aside a tarpaulin, still searching around wildly for the last thing on her list. "When I find that bomb it's going to be a precision engineered, down to the micron job to disrupt it so…" her eyes lit up as she saw on a far shelf what she was looking for, "fetch me that angle-grinder!"

Walker leapt to it, returning with it in his hand. "Can I go now Miss?"

"Oh _alright_."

He leapt into a car.

"But _before _you go," continued James, "I need the combination to the villa's safe to collect the Wand." Walker looked doubtful. "I need it Walker. I can't do this without it."

He gave her the combination.

James memorised it. "That the real combination? You're not lying to me?"

"Your putting your life on the line. I'm not lying to you."

_Our lives will be on the line_ – thought Sark – _and I don't think it can be done_.

Walker switched on the ignition and shifted into gear and made to leave, but then paused, giving James a sly look. "That Little Miss CIA who was here before. What did she look like? Pretty?"

Sark's eyes widened in disbelief. What? – Wanker had been cuddling up to James and now he was planning to hit on _Sydney_? Maybe he should just shoot the fucker after all, just to be on the safe side!

James shrugged, recalling Sydney. "Good looking? Yeah, I guess. In that well-known, Slavic, 'I wrestle wolves bare-handed in the Tundra for the honour of my village' kind of way."

They both snorted with laughter. There was a split-second of stillness as Walker held James' gaze, saying goodbye, and then nodded a curt farewell to Sark. At the last he paused, addressing Sark. "One last thing mate, that crew Sloane's sending will probably be led by someone called Allison Doren. A real bitch. And I don't want to add to the pressure here, but for some reason," he pointed at James, "she hates you. She was always going to kill you." Behind James, Sark stiffened. Walker drove off.

For the first time in days Sark and James were quite alone. James knew he had come to save her. Sark refused to really think about why. Standing at her side, slowly folding his arms, head tilted to one side, teeth gritting slightly, Sark stared ahead. With all the pressure on him he had one key thought grinding through his mind.

"Did you just have a private little joke with him?"

James, tilted her head to one side and also stared straight ahead.

"Yeah, so? And you have tête-à-têtes withMiss_ Wolf-Wrestler_?" She folded her arms. "And, may I remind you that L.A. is about to be turned into a pot roast?"

Sark almost flinched.

There was a pause. They still stared straight ahead, neither of them looked at the other.

"So how many people did you kill by the way?" she asked, almost conversationally. "Just while we're on the subject."

Sark knew James was talking about Mexico City and the use of the Rambaldi bomb.

"Sixty-two." He didn't now how he even managed to get the words out.

"Not even gonna try and tell me 'you had no choice'?"

"There's always a choice James. Even if someone's holding a gun to your head you've always got the option of letting them shoot. I'm not going to lie about it, I did it because I thought it was the best thing to do at the time."

She tilted her head slightly toward him, but still staring straight ahead. Sark felt he was on the verge of receiving an all-time invective tongue-lashing, but all she said was -

"And now? What do you think now?"

"I think I was wrong."

There was another pause and then they silently split up, Sark to load and start the car, James to raid the safe.

With James momentarily gone, Sark knew he should be concentrating every energy upon their plan, but despite their current situation he was still full of confusion as to what he felt, and now also with the subject of Mexico out in the open, full of self-disgust as well. He refused to attend to any of it. He would not think about it. He would deal with it later. But it was like a tonne of water on the other side of a dam, one crack and it was going to come through and he'd be dwelling on it and, yup, too late … it was on his mind.

_Make your mind up you conscienceless, murdering bastard! What the fuck do you want? To redeem yourself? To run away? Do you want James? Sydney? What? WHAT IS GOING ON IN THAT POT OF MAGGOTS THAT PASSES FOR YOUR 'MIND' SARKEY?_

Leaning into the car he'd chosen, Sark furiously tossed his Glock onto the passenger seat; seriously wishing he had some ready punch-bag upon which to take out all his frustrations as he had back in that stairwell in Stuttgart. He heard what he thought was James behind him and half-turned to see -

"Get your hands up Sark. You're finally caught."

Sark found himself staring straight into the muzzle of a CIA standard issue automatic. Seeing who it was, he smirked, knowing the expression on his face would wind-up his opponent far more than anything else he could possibly do right then, and with a slow, insolent sneer he started off as he meant to go on: deliberately disobeying orders. Instead of raising his hands, he tilted his head and casually slid them in his pockets, insolently weighing up his opponent, smirking, dismissive.

It was quite a relief really. Now instead of fretting he had something to do instead, a problem to solve, someone to beat up. All the stuff he was good at.

On the two occasions when he'd seriously wanted a punch bag to take out his frustrations, the same person had come through twice.

"You know Vaughn, sometimes I feel almost sorry for you."


	36. Chapter 36

**Chapter 36: Coup de Jarnac** - _a crippling blow to the back of the opponent's exposed knee or hamstring._

Vaughn steadied himself, taking aim: arms out before him, slightly flexed at the elbows, both fists wrapped around the gun, feet planted, legs apart, knees slightly bent. He was aiming squarely at Sark's head. Sark surveyed his stance.

"What's that, your 'looking butch' routine?"

"Back up against the car and spread. I'm cuffing you to it." Vaughn sounded tense, strung out, edgy.

"Up against the car, spread _and _cuffed? Planning to have sex with me?"

If Sark hadn't been under the pressure of trying to factor in where James was, of having to reckon up the time before Sloane's crew arrived, of having a ticking countdown to saving L.A. - presuming that could even be done – and of having a subliminal worry about Sydney, he would probably have laughed outright at the expression on Vaughn's face: pure aversion, a disgusted horror.

"You know Vaughn, sometimes I think the lady-boy doth protest too much?"

Vaughn blinked and then shook his sweat damped hair out of his eyes. He steadied the gun again. "Shut up … you_ fuck!"_

"And now with the dirty-talk … Why Vaughn, you _never _swear."

"Toss me your piece!" Vaughn's voice held a cracked, splintered tone that Sark was almost puzzled at.

"Toss you my piece? Be careful Vaughn, or I'll think you're flirting again."

"I said give me your gun!" That same alarmingly cracked, almost squeaking, splintered note.

"My gun's on the passenger seat of the car behind me. For me to give you my gun I would have to pick it up. Now, is that something you really want?"

Truth was, by rights Sark knew he should have simply reached across and beaten Vaughn unconscious by now. Somewhere out there Allison was on her way, leading Sloane's extraction team. He was up against a deadline however he cut it, and he was wasting time on this pratt? He should be just whacking him out. So what was stopping him?

Sark flicked a pebble hard with his foot and wondered why he just didn't flick it up into Vaughn's eye, take his gun off him and get this over with.

_Does Vaughn have help nearby?_

"Where are your CIA chums Agent Vaughn? Been a naughty boy and come out without permission, have you?"

Vaughn blinked the sweat out of his eyes.

"Shut up. I'm calling H.Q. for back-up." That stressed, strung out note again.

_Calling H.Q. for back-up …_ So no-one else was here then. Part of Sark relaxed. He had been worrying that Vaughn was here on a tip-off from Sydney to the CIA, that she'd set him up after all. But Vaughn's statement implied that he had come alone on some bizarre off-chance …Vaughn had his comm out, but had half-dropped it and was trying to wrangle it whilst keeping his gaze and gun trained on Sark.

Sark didn't want Vaughn to get back up. Extra men, satellite surveillance: far too tedious. In the still, heavy dark the perfect diversionary tool came to him: he suddenly knew why Vaughn was so strung out.

"Did you enjoy watching Sydney and I say farewell? Really, who would ever have thought it of you, Vaughn: voyeurism."

The words dropped like pebbles down a scree: discrete, curt, clipped, each seemingly inconsequential in themselves, but the beginnings of a landslide.

"_Don't you even mention her name!"_ It was a raw scream; the gun shook in Vaughn's hand.

"Or what? She'll re-appear in a puff of smoke?"

Vaughn's emotionally hurt, distorted face reddened. "Where is Sydney? I saw her leave. Where did she go? _Why was she here?"_

Sark regarded him. Vaughn must have been here all the time. He'd only made his move after Walker had gone, just waiting for the numbers to even up.

Sark knew that Vaughn - sweating, red-eyed, unshaven - had come out alone, following Sydney, getting out of his depth. It was the kind of stupid thing Vaughn would do. The kind of stupid, hubristic, _proprietary_ thing Vaughn would do because Sydney was his _girlfriend _…

"Sydney's not here." Sark hissed the words out. "She's gone. Oh she's quite safe, in fact I helped her leave as you well know."

"_Shut up!" _

_Don't want to talk about it Vaughn?_ Sark almost sneered, but he was surprised at how furiously angry he genuinely felt.

"She's gone to rescue her father on a _sanctioned_ CIA mission," he continued, his words like arrows: poison tipped. "One you'd be on if you weren't pissing about here, playing Boys Own Rescue Mission for people who don't need to be rescued."

The stuttering look on Vaughn's face told Sark he'd hit a target. It didn't lessen Sark's anger, just fanned it.

"As to why she was here Vaughn, maybe you should ask her, if she lets you catch up with her. I got the distinct impression that," - _damn whatever her real reason was! - _"it was becauseshe wanted to see me and she thought I'd be here." Sark smirked: provocative, elegantly vicious. His words came out like honey poured over razor blades. "Sydney and I do so enjoy our … _little games_ together. I'm sure even you must have noticed."

It was like pressing a Pavlovian button.

"_I told to you not to mention her name!"_

"Why not? I like her, she certainly likes me. You _saw_ how we are together."

"What I saw, it was … it was _nothing_!" That cracked top-note again. "There's … it could have been _anything_! It could have been …" There was almost a sobbing note to it now, "there's things like _brainwashing …_"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, face up to it." It was one of the few times Sark had ever sworn out loud, but he felt the spur of bitter scorn. "Sydney and I have a connection between us that you can never possibly sever. Just accept it."

_Because I'm having to …_

"I'm telling you to _shut up_!" That fractured, sobbing note again.

"Or what, you'll shoot me? You're not man enough. What are you Vaughn, mid to late 30s? - and you're still just a little boy."

_And I'm the opposite, an ancient monster hiding behind a boy's face._ Sark startled himself, and then slapped the unbidden thought away. He didn't even know where it had come from. His face betrayed nothing of it.

"Christ, they even _call_ you Boy Scout. In England they'd laugh at your codename. In England a Boy Scout is a mummy's boy, a nancy," he thought of an American word, "a wimp," and then fell back into Brit-speak, reeling off the insults. "A trainspotter, a spindle-shanks, a wazzock, someone who's a bit nesh, a pansy, a wet, a milk-sop, a stamp-collector, an anorak, someone who's a bit …" he bit his lip thinking for the precise description, "someone who's a bit like _you_ Vaughn."

Vaughn had the gun. Sark had his hands in his pockets and was ostensibly unarmed. Vaughn was the one under siege.

"You don't even know her!" That same, broken, shattered, half-sobbing note.

"No, _you_ don't, you sad git! You just _think_ you do!"

And then Sark knew why he hadn't left sooner, why he hadn't slammed Vaughn senseless already: this exchange wasn't about getting Vaughn away from his comm, it was about Sydney. He had wanted a fight with Vaughn about Sydney. He had wanted a face-off, and here it was.

Sydney: the one thing he and Vaughn would ever have in common, the one thing they would never agree on.

"You think you know her?" Sark continued, hissing, "how can you, you've never even met her! That person you think you know? – she's just another one of Sydney's disguises! The one she wears every day: Little Miss Bristow who tries to be perfect for everyone. I'm amazed she hasn't split into a thousand pieces trying to live up to everyone's different expectations. Who is she for you – Little Suzy Home-maker? Super-Agent By Day, and 'dead from the neck up and polite from the waste down' by night?"

Vaughn flinched.

"Well I've met the real Sydney, I met her in Paris when she was purring it up like crazy as a nightclub singer, thinking it was safe because she thought no-one would see it was the real her doing it. I met her in FAPSE headquarters, verbally trick-shotting me, when just for a second she couldn't hide the fact she was interested. I used to meet her at SD-6 when she was so desperate to keep her hate-face on for me that I knew there had to be a reason behind it. And I met her again tonight! The real Sydney, warm, passionate, and needing someone who'll let her know it's safe to show it. The real Sydney is someone you will never meet because she'll never _let _you meet her! She knows you'd be ashamed of her, and," Sark heard a white hiss in his head as he hit the truth, "and that makes her ashamed of _herself!"_

He was almost breathless. He hadn't realised he had that many words in him about someone. He didn't know he'd done that much thinking about Sydney.

Vaughn's words bawled out, jerking Sark's attention back to him. "Don't tell me I don't know her! It's you who don't know her! You just _wish _you did!" His voice held almost a screaming note. "You're just someone on the outside of life, looking in! Well the rest of us – the humans on the planet, Sydney, me - _we don't want you here!"_

Something in Sark's gut twinged … _outside of life, looking in … _a confused, far-off memory of an ant-farm and … He pulled himself into the present. As sneering, cool and goading as the shattered Vaughn was hysterical.

"Vaughn, it's strange, but have you ever wondered how odd it is that we're almost two opposing male archetypes? There's me: ruthless, controlling, decisive, action orientated, goal directed, achievement focused, and then there's … you. Wonder which type Sydney will pick in the end?" He let his gaze dismissively trawl over Vaughn. "Reckon she's already tried you. Maybe she'll try me? And if it doesn't work out between us … well," he snickered, mimicking the line from _Casablanca_, "we'll always have Stuttgart."

Sark had only been guessing at Stuttgart, but when he saw the other man snarl he knew he'd found another Pavlovian button: the stairwell incident in Stuttgart, Sydney's non-shooting of Sark.

_Must hurt to know that your lover risked you for the sake of another man, especially for one she purportedly hates._

Sark had pressed a button alright, Vaughn looked wild and then his voice filled the night air with an angry roar.

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT STUTTGART MEANS TO ME SARK? IT SHOWED UP THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US! WHEN I PUT A GUN TO SOMEONE'S HEAD, I DON'T JUST _SHOOT!"_

"Neither do I Vaughn, or you'd obviously be dead." Sark held his counter-poise against Vaughn, his voice a poisoned blade, smoothly toxic. "We both know I had plenty of time to shoot you in Stuttgart, but I chose not to. You're alive because I let you live. Deal with it."

Silence reverberated. Vaughn's breath filled the night with the sound of raw, fractured hitches. His eyes were reddened. He looked as though he was barely holding himself together. After what he'd seen tonight he knew he'd lost Sydney – after all he'd done to try to keep her, to show her his love - and he'd lost her to Sark: his greatest fear come true.

Sark wondered if Vaughn were actually going to start crying.

He cocked his head, genuinely querying yet still managing to somehow drip contempt, pushing the knife in as far as it would go.

"What's it like, knowing she won't ever love you, no matter how hard you love her?"

The ultimate flash-point, and Vaughn did not pull the trigger.

Sark knew then that the poor bastard just didn't have it in him: shoot in the heat of battle, yes, but in cold blood? – no. Strip it down to it's core and Sark knew it went like this: Vaughn was a human being struggling to hold down a job he should never have been in, and Sark was a machine-tooled, ruthless bastard. Training or no training, Project Birthday or no Project Birthday, each were what they were born to be.

If Sark had no training whatsoever, and Vaughn were still a fully prepped field agent, then Sark could still have taken him.

A trickle of sweat that had nothing to do with the hot L.A. night ran down Vaughn's face, and Sark knew another thing then: not only was Vaughn not going to shoot him, but that he, Sark, wasn't going to kill Vaughn.

_What's the point? I know Sydney doesn't love him … and so does he. I don't need to save her from him – Sydney isn't Vaughn's to lose. He doesn't even know her, not the real Sydney, not the Sydney I saw on a stage in Paris. She'd never let him meet the real Sydney anyway, she knows he'd be scared of her._

Sark abruptly turned toward the car. He didn't even make a pretence of it. He simply turned to the car and walked toward it. When he reached it, he'd lean on the horn and call for James. Sark was leaving. There was nothing to stay for.

Vaughn didn't have Sydney so Sark didn't need to fight him. Game over.

"Stop!" yelled Vaughn, voice fractured, almost sobbingly angry, but still unable to make himself _do_ anything about it.

Sark waved a hand over his shoulder, a dismissive gesture.

"I said _STOP!"_

"You're not going to shoot me Vaughn – an unarmed man who didn't shoot you? - you haven't got it in you."

"You're going down if I have to use my bare hands!" screamed Vaughn.

Reaching the car, Sark cast his reply over his shoulder, not even bothering to look. "Vaughn, the only way you could beat me up is if I was handcuffed to a chair."

Sark was completely disdainful. Vaughn had nothing he wanted. Vaughn wasn't worth dealing with. Vaughn would never shoot him. Sark reached over to press the car horn. Sark had forgotten his own maxim: words can do more damage than bullets.

Vaughn called up from behind him, a last, defiant, hoarse, desperate, shout.

"YOU'LL NEVER BE ANYTHING BETTER THAN TRASH!" It was a scream that filled the night. "You think Sydney will want to be your friend? You think you can change? – well you can't! You're just a killer. You're scum! You'll never be anything better! YOU'LL NEVER BE ANYTHING BETTER EVEN IF YOU _TRY_!"

Whether Vaughn knew it or not, that was the only thing he could ever have said that would have stopped Sark in his tracks.

"_YOU'RE JUST A PIECE OF TRASH!"_

Sark's hand poised over the car horn as memories detonated inside his head.

… _Oh puhleeze, cut the soulful 'I'm hurt' routine, you bastard. You haven't got it in you to be hurt! … _ _a vicious killer_ _who'll never be able to change or be any better? You think I feel any CONNECTION to you? … _And then a different voice …_ I don't need you to wish me luck you bastard … we're not friends and we're not going to be friends …_

All the times I've let myself be treated as a servant, have carried out terrible orders … done terrible things I've known I shouldn't … and I can't ever change …

Vaughn's continuing screams reverberated in the still, night air.

"YOU CAN'T CHANGE!" he screamed. "YOU DON'T EVEN WANT TO! - AND EVEN IF YOU TRY, YOU'LL _FAIL!"_

Sark turned, one thought blasting through his head: I'M NOT LIKE THAT!

For a second nothing happened and then … he bore down on Vaughn. Swift, implacable, covering the gap. He saw Vaughn's face abruptly pale and thought it was with anger, he didn't realise it was with fear. Sark's face was a death mask: his mask, someone else's death. A shocked Vaughn got his gun up. Sark ignored it and just kept coming.

"You're just out for what you can get," Vaughn roared, "and if you can't get it then you'll take it anyway! You'll work for anyone. Everyone's little servant! They snap their fingers and you just jump. You work for people who _firebomb churches!"_

Sark started sprinting at him.

Vaughn started stumbling backward, trying to keep space between them, somehow unable to bring himself to pull the trigger even as he carried on roaring his rage.

"You're the kind of creep who thinks there's no place for decency in this job! That's where you're different from Sydney. BECAUSE SHE KNOWS THERE IS!"

_Don't talk about Sydney – I know her, I knew her even before I was born… I -_

Vaughn's roar came again. "What Sydney deserves is a chance with a man who's a decent human being - _not a piece of filth like you!"_

Sark sprang.

Vaughn scrambled backwards, almost falling. "YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW THAT SHE HAS FEELINGS FOR YOU?" he screamed as Sark was on him, with Sark punching and kicking, Vaughn's gun hand kept at bay. "She denies that she cares, she tries to hide it, but she's LYING! I KNEW EVEN BEFORE TONIGHT! Do you think I'm STUPID? But I'll do my damndest to make sure she doesn't go to scum like you! I might not deserve her, BUT _SHE_ DOESN'T DESERVE _YOU!_"

It occurred to a calm, far off part of Sark's mind that Vaughn was pushing him so far so hard so that he could finally make himself shoot: in hot-blooded self-defence.

"She's lying to herself!" choked Vaughn as Sark grabbed him by the throat, strangling him, trying to stop the words from coming out. "She thinks you can change. That if she can just hold on long enough, you'll turn some kind of corner. Well you won't! You can't! YOU HAVEN'T GOT IT IN YOU!"

And then Sark knew why he'd stuck around to fight a man who had nothing worth taking: because this squeaky, squealy, pen-pushing, angst-prone, decisiveness-free-zone who held a gun on him, did have something Sark wanted. He'd had a decent childhood, the choice of a career, a clean sheet with the forces of law and order, the prospect of love untainted by any previous damage: he had the _life_ Sark wanted. Sark could have raged: the little git had a life, and with his endless shillly-shallying he didn't even know how to live it!

Half-snarling, something snapped inside him and he flung Vaughn from him, releasing him. He wasn't going to kill him, not for committing the crime of making Sark partly envy him.

Vaughn staggered back, free hand to his wealed neck, sucking in rasping breath, and with the gun – by accident or design - raising at Sark.

Sark blinked. What? Vaughn was going to shoot?

"And if you don't put that gun down, your head is coming straight off. Oh, and by the way, when I have a gun pointed at someone's head? - I _do_ just shoot."

James held a gun straight to Vaughn's head. She'd gotten it off one of the dead guards back in the house. In her other hand she held the Rambaldi Wand.

Vaughn was startled, his gaze flicking about. "I am a CIA agent," his voice was raw from his shouting and his near-strangulation. "I am a CIA agent, and you are threatening to kill me."

"Nah. I've got the gun pointed at your head and in your case that's a non-lethal target. If I wanted to shoot your brains, I'd have it pointed at your ass. Drop it." She meant Vaughn's gun.

Without any preamble Sark did what he'd been telling himself to do for the past five minutes, he knocked Vaughn's gun out of the way and then knocked the man out. Vaughn slumped to the floor like a sack of potatoes that hadn't even been tied in the middle.

Sark's head swirled, a kaleidoscope of exploding colours, threaded through with disbelief. He felt he were floating. … _What? … James just picked me? … She had a chance to escape with Vaughn … to hand me in … to even let him kill me … and she picked me? … She had a choice? … And … she sided with me! … _And then he felt a horrible vertigo, a sense of panic because he remembered her words. _Oh,_ a_nd by the way, when I have a gun pointed at someone's head? I do just shoot …_

A screaming horror ran through him.

She had heard Vaughn's comment about Stuttgart. How long had she been standing there? Was she standing there even before then? How long after? How much had she heard? What had she heard about Sydney?

_Vaughn and I were fighting like madmen over Sydney. _

Does she think I love Sydney? _Do I love Sydney?_ How much of what Vaughn had said, of what I had said, did she believe? Worse still, how much of what Vaughn said about me was … _true_?

Horrified, Sark could not make himself look up from Vaughn's prone body, scared of what he might see on James' face.

James betrayed nothing of what she had heard or thought and instead looked down at the unconscious figure of the previously hysterical man. She peered over him: small, dainty, birdlike.

"Jeez, who stole _his_ bicycle?"

Sark's throat locked, but then he was saved from having to comment, because his gaze was drawn across the vast expanse of lawn to where, through a belt of trees, he could see a speeding cavalcade of three cars whipping up the long, curving drive: Allison.

He was almost relieved, it rescued him from the agonies of introspection and discussion and questioning. It put off having to sort things out.

He yanked James by the wrist, hurtling across the car pound. He knew that the car he'd picked was no good for this new job, it wasn't even off-road: to get past those cars coming up the driveway they'd need something very fast and very nippy. He'd seen a vehicle that fitted the bill. It even had the keys in it. As they passed the car he had intended to use he got his gun out of it and she hauled out the angle grinder and some of the other stuff she'd wanted. He almost told her to leave it, that they wouldn't be using it, that they weren't going to save the world after all. He'd made up his mind. There wasn't enough time left, it couldn't be done, they were just going to get killed trying. They got on the wheels Sark had spotted, James dropping the equipment she'd salvaged into it's pannier carriers; the wand tucked down the back of her trousers as Sark had his gun holstered on his ankle. He flicked the ignition and they ripped off.

"Who's bike is this?' he called over his shoulder as he punched the black BMW up through the gears, flashing toward the oncoming cars.

"Walker's!"

In the rapidly increasing windstream James heard Sark's gleeful snicker trailing over his shoulder. "Good. Let's wreck it!"

The bike whammed up the drive, speeding between the oncoming cars, presenting a target too fast to hit, but not too fast to see. The cars pulled 180s to get after them. Evidently Allison was not to be cheated of her quarry. They ripped up toward the estate's gates, Sark pulling ahead on the curved drive: the cars had as much top as the bike, but he had greater acceleration.

He could hear James screaming to be heard behind him, her voice fighting against the whistling wind.

"We've got to turn right at the gate to get into the city!"

_And to turn left to live._

"There's time, we can still do it!" she screamed.

_There isn't, we can't!_

The bike decelerated smoothly at the open gate, and then … turned left.

"_Sark!"_

James' scream was ripped away in the wind.

"_Sark, stop! We can still do it!"_

He accelerated away from the city.

"_Sark! It's our responsibility! If you don't do this now - _

He heard James' screaming voice being clawed away by the wind … she'd hate him forever for this, but at least she'd be alive to do it. Her plan could not be done.

And then another voice came, one that was clear, definite, speaking from inside his head not out, another voice which had spoken to him that night: Vaughn's.

_You haven't got it in you._

Sark felt a white rushing noise of rage in his head.

YOU HAVEN'T GOT IT IN YOU.

His vision narrowed to a dark focal point, blistering with anger.

_YOU HAVEN'T GOT IT IN YOU._

He didn't have it in him? WELL … FUCK IT! – HE _DID!_

He pulled a u-turn so brutal that it burned rubber into the tarmac and suddenly they were headed right. He clicked up through the gears again … and then felt a sense of panic. He wasn't wearing a crash-helmet. He didn't have a visor on him. At the speeds he was pulling he was blinded by the wind and dust. _He didn't know which way to go!_

And then it was alright, and then he could see clearly, and then he did know the way because James had reached into his inside jacket pocket and popped his Oakleys on his nose.


	37. Chapter 37

**Chapter 37: Cob's Traverse** _- retreating indefinitely (running away)._

"Honey, it's alright. We'll just get through this. These days, they can fix anything."

"Shit, in that case I must look _really_ bad." Her jaw had been deliberately fractured with an almost surgical precision and was swollen beyond belief, she could barely speak, her words almost indecipherable.

Jack got a vicious grip on himself. His throat was thick with unvoiced howls, his eyes stinging with unshed tears but he refused to allow himself the release of grief, to show any fractured weakness that would cause Irina to lose heart. "Honey, admittedly you look slightly worse than those times when you had to get up extra early in the morning for class - before you had your usual Hoover Dam's worth of black coffee - but that's all."

"Worse than _that_? There's no hope."

Jack was still strapped hopelessly to the gurney, he could not move, neither could Irina, still tied to her chair away from him. In his extremity, Jack didn't realize she was only joking. "Irina, there's - "

Irina could still see him from out of her damaged face. Jack caught a glittering glance that slid its way out from under a single, hopelessly puffed up lid. She spoke. "It doesn't hurt." She saw him look at her from out of a world of his own pain. They hadn't touched him, but he was in agony for her. "It doesn't hurt Jack." From her dislocated, broken mouth it came out: _i usn urt ack_ … "I've got a mental-lock. I can't feel it."

"Irina," Jack's voice almost cracked, "the CIA are going to be looking for me. It's just a matter of time before they find me." He projected every ounce of confidence he had, privately believing that there was no reason at all why the CIA should even know where to start looking, but he had to give Irina _hope_. "All we have to do is keep them talking. Just tell them what they want to know. Tell them anything. When help gets here we can pick them up anyway so there won't have been any spilled intel."

Irina gave one of her catty, snarking half-grins. Well, she hoped it looked like that. She doubted that her face still retained its ability to express the way it had been able to just hours earlier. She was laughing because if Jack was that desperate, well, she knew she must look _really_ fucked.

"Irina, tell them. Whatever it is, it's not worth it. We can deal our way out. _I_ can deal a way out for both of us!"

With her limited, battered vision Irina gave Jack the quelling look she used to reserve for students arriving late to lectures. With one of her few fingers that wasn't yet broken she began tapping out a Morse message against the side of the chair she was still shackled to, so Sloane couldn't see or hear it if it were on surveillance.

i. c.a.n.t. t.e.l.l. i.t.s. s.y.d.n.e.y.

With a mounting horror Jack knew then that Irina was doomed. Because whatever had gone on between he and she, whatever they had done to each other, he had never truly believed that Irina would endanger Sydney's life. He had lied about it and said that she would, he had tried to turn Sydney against her mother, but deep down, he had never believed it. He knew Irina was doomed, because if Irina hadn't broken yet, then this must be about the safety of Sydney's very life. And if this was about Sydney's very life, then Irina was not going to let herself break.

The sound he had come to dread with ever fiber in him announced itself. The quiet, mundane squeak of the door opening. It meant they were coming for her again.

"Whatever you want, ask me!" He shouted it out before Sloane was even half way across the floor. State secrets? They were nothing. Right then, Jack was a man prepared to sell his very _soul_ if it could stop Sloane.

Sloane's voice was it's usual smooth, sibilant self.

"I would Jack, but the information I want, you just don't have."

"Then I can _get it for you!"_

"Come along Irina." Gripping the back of her chair, ready to move her back to 'the conversation room', Sloane was almost a kindly carer speaking to an invalid they were about to take to the park. Almost. "We're ready for you now …"

Jack twisted against his bonds in ways the human body was probably never meant to move.

"Get. Off. My. WIFE!" It was an almighty roar. But it had no effect. Sloane simply moved Irina out anyway.

As they moved down the corridor, they could hear Jack's roaring voice, issuing out all that was left to him, threats which right then he could not carry out.

"SLOANE, I'M GOING TO _KILL YOU FOR THIS!"_

WHAM! 

The bike lurched under the impact of the car behind it.

Sark was seriously wishing he hadn't wasted time initially going left when he should have gone right. Like changing leads on a dance floor, it had just fucked everything up. The delay had given Allison's convoy of cars time to close the gap coming up the driveway. The cars had hit the road, turning right after Sark, just as Sark had passed the gates.

The bike had acceleration and manoeuvrability but the cars had just as much top speed, and on the long straight road, manoeuvrability and acceleration weren't helping him pull ahead. He couldn't even go flat-out. At the speeds he was pulling, even with the Oakleys on his eyes were still watering. Any faster and he just wouldn't be able to see.

WHAM! 

The bike lurched again. One of the big Mercedes was simply walloping into them from behind. Slamming into the back wheel. Trying to kill them by getting them to crash. Part of him wondered why their assailants weren't just shooting them, presumably killing them this way was just more fun. It wouldn't take long after all, a few more crunches like that and they would be sent spinning wildly off the road, killed by a long scrape across a hundred yards of tarmac. With his gun on his ankle, he couldn't even reach it to shoot at them.

He could hear James' scream of panic every time the car hit them. Her arms wrapped around him, body tucked tight against him, almost trying to burrow into his back. She was screaming again … but this time it sounded like - what the fuck? - _words?_ She was trying to say something? He didn't dare slow down the bike to hear, he just tried to snatch the sounds out of the high-speed windstream that ripped them away. But it wasn't working, because all he could hear was something like: _go faster_. And that was just crazy.

And then he heard it again. This time bellowing, angry, right into his ear.

"I said GO FASTER!"

Uh? 

He glanced at the speedo, they were already right at the edge of his ability in the circumstances, and she wanted to go _faster?_ And then he shrugged to himself. Well why not? What difference did it make? They were going to die anyway. Might as well go out, flat out. He twisted the throttle and sent every dial flicking into the red. The bike leapt forward, pulling ahead of the car, but Sark knew it wouldn't be for long, and at this speed the next smack into their rear tyre would kill them.

He then felt something that, even in these circumstances, made him blurt with a crazy laughter. James' small hand shoving deep inside his hip pocket, moving against his groin. Delving.

Sark's gleeful howls were ripped away on the wind as he kept the throttle wide open.

"Deeper and a little to the left, please!"

"_Oh for fuck's sake, will you be serious!"_ He heard her scream of outrage.

Sark was grinning madly, throwing his head back and roaring with laughter. This was a truly great way to die!

And then she yanked her hand out. Puzzled, Sark checked her grip in the rear-side mirror and saw a handful of loose change …

… be released from her grip.

She didn't even throw it, she just let it go.

Straight into the path of the windscreen of the car belting up at an insane speed behind them.

Pure physics.

At these speeds the loose change wasn't loose change anymore, velocity had converted it into something else: ammunition. The shotgun blast of cents, dimes and quarters punched through the windscreen glass and then punched through the driver.

Sark had always wondered why in Brit-slang loose change was called 'shrapnel'; now he had as good an explanation as any.

The car behind them lurched, slowed slightly, swerved, carved rubber into the road, and then lost it. It rolled over itself, end to end, like a toy flung by an angry child. The car behind it clipped into it and was sent barrelling off into the trees that lined the road.

Two down one to go.

Sark slowed the bike enough to get his gun, shoving it into the front of his waistband. And then ramped up the speed again. The third car had swerved round the other two and was still on them.

He let it get to within twenty yards and then slowed slightly, allowing himself to half turn in the saddle as the bike rushed forward at what was still a mad pace. He heard James gasp behind him as she realised that now he wasn't even properly looking where he was going. He was looking back at the car instead. Aiming at it. Aiming at who was inside.

He saw he was aiming at Allison.

_Shit! _

He saw her shocked face and felt a jolt of disbelief himself. Mentally he screamed at himself. _Pull the fucking trigger!_ _Just do it!_ Uncertainty. Indecision. _She'd kill you if the positions were reversed!_ _She's trying to kill you now! _But I can't do it! _Just fucking do it_ _Sarkey, and then she'll be dead and you won't even have to explain to Sydney about the cloning! No-one will ever know! The evidence will be dead!_

He pulled the trigger.

And shot the car safely off the road by deliberately clipping the bonnet and letting it fly up, blocking the windscreen. The occupants were unharmed.

"Whoah! Cool shot!" James screamed, despite herself.

Sark turned his gaze forward, blasting the bike down into Los Angeles as James' arms and thighs wrapped close around him.

Knowing he'd let Allison go, he hoped against hope that the old adage wouldn't turn out true … _no good deed goes unpunished_ …

Sydney slammed the accelerator to the floor as she headed towards Simon Walker's co-ordinates. The CIA point-troop were already assaulting the building.

Everything in her told her she was going in the right direction, in all ways.

She had been right to trust Sark.

She been wrong about a lot of things concerning Sark, and not just the shape of his hands.

_He hadn't been the driving force behind that bugging of my house … And the sex tapes? He didn't even watch them properly! He fast-forwarded so he wouldn't have to see!_

Sark had committed enormities, she knew that, but there were also things he hadn't done. And that which he was still capable of doing? … well he was capable of changing.

_He can change … I know he can._

_He'll come into the CIA. It might take time and persuasion and all sorts of deals will have to be struck, but he'll come._

He had the capacity for change, and although it caused the ache of fury and sadness within her, she knew why he now had that capacity: James Dodgson.

Whether she knew it or not, James Dodgson, a freak genius thrown up from the genetic lucky bag of dirt poor white trash, had cracked the code to the human equivalent of the Enigma cipher: she'd translated Sark into something like normality. She seemingly hated him, but that didn't matter, because Sark didn't hate her. James Dodgson had in some way presented Sark with an alternative to who he was: the alternative of who he could be.

Even in an extreme such as this, Sydney felt a spasm of jealousy.

She gave herself a severe telling-off.

_Well, if you hadn't kicked him back twenty-eight times in a row she wouldn't have been his girl, you would have! IT'S ALL YOUR OWN FAULT!_

Gritting her teeth and gripping the wheel, she focussed her thoughts ahead of her and hurtled on.

Swooping toward the sound of gunfire she was seized by an utter certainty. She was going to make it. She was going to make this turn out. Dad, Sark … everything. If there was such a thing as destiny … then hers was to _rescue_.

Sark felt the bike skid under him in a slide as they rocketed across the marble-flagged plaza. They were headed straight at the vacant 'To Let' office tower block that the Wand told them the bomb was in. James had located it by using the Wand almost as a direction finder, picking up on key frequencies. Lead by it they had roared across town leaving a trail of near chaos in their wake: red lights run, lanes of fast-moving traffic left in a jumble as they powered the wrong way up one-way streets.

James had lost count of the car crashes they'd caused.

"It's on about the fifth or sixth floor!" she screamed. "I'll know more when we get in!"

They had minutes left.

Sark slowed, idling the engine, standing up slightly in the saddle to get a view. The building was lit but empty, it's sliding-glass entrance doors locked. The doors sat regally at the head of a rise of wide, imposing marble steps, a portico of columns differentiating the plate glass door area. There was almost the air of a temple about it.

_No-wonder Sloane picked this place, the theatrical bastard._

"We're running out of time! We have to get in!" That was James.

Sark knew it was his imagination, but just then he felt he could hear the long dead, but somehow very present, Rambaldi darkly chuckling in his ear, taunting them to Bring It On.

He revved the bike, aimed straight at the steps, accelerated up them, shot-out the plate glass doors, and lunged straight through the ready-made gap into the foyer, still on the bike.

_You want us to Bring It, Rambaldi? Fine. We're bringing it._

A fanfare of burglar alarms erupted around them, announcing their entrance.

"Shit. The police'll come!"

"Not for a good ten minutes James. And by that point we've either dealt with the bomb and we're out of here or it won't matter because no-one in this part of Los Angeles will ever have to worry about anything ever again."

At the far end of the foyer were the elevators – Sark had called them 'lifts'. Sark had ridden the bike into one, curving an s-swerve backwards as they slid across the tiled floor to land neatly inside it, facing towards the elevator doors as they rode up.

Tinkly muzak played.

Sark looked down at James' hand holding the wand, it was guiding them to the exact spot.

"What _is _that?"

"Not sure." She looked up around her as the muzak jingled about them, thinking. "I think it's _The Girl From Ipanema_."

The building was rocked by explosions and gunfire. Jack felt a grim determination and a dark glinting certainty. He didn't give a damn who was assaulting the place, whoever they were, he was on their side! They could be from hell itself and he would be on their team, so long as they would stop Sloane from hurting Irina.

All his training told him to keep quiet, to not draw attention to himself in case it jogged Sloane's men to remember his existence and use him as a hostage, or just plain shoot him. But instead he was roaring like a mighty, trapped beast. Attracting as much attention to himself as he could. Desperately hoping to fetch help in time to save Irina.

And with a mad jolt of hope he saw the door open.

It was Sloane.

Jack jerked against his unyielding bonds, instinctively launching at him. And then felt that mad, crazy hope again. Sloane had Irina with him. She was slumped, shackled to the chair, seemingly totally unconscious, horribly battered, but he could see her breathing, she was _still alive!_

His game-playing kicked in and he immediately moved to tactics.

"Leave us here. Get out now Sloane. Whoever's assaulting the building, they're coming after you. And you can move much faster without the two of us!"

Jack hoped to whatever gods were listening that Sloane did not pick up on the obvious logic flaw: that he could use Irina and Jack as hostages.

"I know Jack. Ordinarily I would use you as hostages. But time is of the essence, and with Irina so," he looked down at her slumped form, seemingly wondering what word he should choose, "_damaged_ … and you would hardly be co-operative … so I think it best to leave without either of you."

Jack felt that wild flare of hope again, and tried to ignore the tiny sliver of disquiet that had just formed in his thumping heart: _this is too easy._

"However," Sloane's sibilant, friendly tones reeked of insanity, "I can't afford to let either of you fall into the hands of the CIA. Irina knows too much. And if you two have formed an alliance during this," he waved his hand idly at the room, indicating their circumstances, as though airily feeling for the words, " 'joint experience', then Irina may decide to side with elements of the CIA. And I can't have that."

Jack went cold. Unblinking. Glaring. As though if he could just stare hard enough at the crazy bastard, he could stop him dead by sheer willpower. He couldn't.

"So, unfortunate though it is, I'm afraid we shan't be meeting ever again."

It was Sloane's euphemism for 'I'm going to kill you both now'.

He was a man who could order any enormity, and yet he could never quite manage to use the brute words for what he did. Maybe he thought he could hide his actions from himself if he just called them something else.

Jack heaved, twisting, on the gurney.

"It will be quick," said Sloane. "I'm testing a new device, for low range but maximum impact explosions. Should ensure complete erasure. There'll be no evidence that you were ever here. Better than bullets really. It won't hurt. It will be total, almost instant, vaporisation." He said it as though that somehow made it all better. "Goodbye Jack." He reached forward to the slumped Irina and flicked a switch on a small device strapped to her chest.

Jack wondered why he didn't just shoot them first, and then he knew why. Sloane wasn't a man who could bear to get his hands dirty, to carry the psychological weight of the up-front acceptance of his actions. That was why he always needed to be at one remove, to not be the man who inflicted the actual torture, to not be the one who actually pulled the trigger. Jack knew that in Sloane's mind, by blowing them up rather than shooting them, he could tell himself that _he_ hadn't been the one to kill them, the _bomb_ had.

He was quite mad.

Sloane left with Jack roaring after him. He scurried away so fast that he didn't hear Jack's shouts abruptly stop before they should have, before Sloane's little device went off.

Jack went silent because he'd seen something Sloane had not: he'd seen Irina move. She was not unconscious.

Irina never had been unconscious. She knew perfectly well the situation she and Jack were in and was determined to do something about it. She looked down at her chest, showing the little toy Sloane had strapped to her, with it's red countdown LED.

She knew from it that Jack had less than twenty seconds to live. She didn't include herself in that calculation because there was no point. She could not plan a way out for herself. She knew she was dead no matter how she cut the cake. But Jack was not. She flexed her legs. Sloane had been in such a hurry that for once he had not chained them to the chair legs. She was badly damaged and she was sure one ankle was broken, but with her legs free she could still make herself move. Irina was physically wrecked, but she was still quite lucid.

She could see Jack struggling like a madman.

"Irina, hold on! I can still do it!"

And could hear his words and knew that he was wrong. He couldn't do it. All he could do was die trying. And she knew that he _would_ die trying. Because with seconds of her life left she had finally realised something: that no matter what she had ever said or done, that no matter what _he_ had ever said or done, that Jack Bristow would never give up on her.

He would die first.

And then she heard a sound that clarified her thoughts and left her knowing what to do. Sydney. In the corridor. Running toward them in the gunfire. Running into range of the blast.

"_Daddy hold on. I'm coming!"_

Less than ten seconds.

Irina knew there was only one chess move remaining, so she took it. Badly wounded but just functioning, she picked herself up and, bent double, ran on her damaged legs straight at the window. Fifteen stories up. She would go through it and fall through the air, the warm night wind in her hair, and laughing inside, because her husband and child would be _safe_.

And then some deity came through for them from somewhere, and with a mighty tearing sound Jack was up and across the room as though he were flying, ripping the device off Irina's chest as she stumbled toward the window and hurling it away from them through the glass.

"Why do we have to have code-names, even though we're right next to each other and we don't even have comms?"

"Because it amuses me."

"Sure it's not because you just like calling me 'Guttersnipe'?"

"Well, that too."

James and Sark crouched over the bomb, working furiously but talking as though they were at a tea party.

"Is there something between you and her?"

"Who?"

"_Wolf-Wrestler? _Who do you _think?"_

"Wolf-Wrest? – her name is _Sydney_." Sark gave James a sly glance. "What's the matter, don't you like her?"

He was rewarded by the slight, annoyed jut of her jaw.

"Well at least she was one up from that Doren _thing_." James ground out.

Sark compressed a blurt of laughter.

"Standing there with that nasty little leather mini skirt on," James continued, "eyeliner all over her face and smoking her cigarettes all over the house. That _skank!_ I mean, Jesus!" she slammed down the Wand, "you dated a girl who _smokes_?"

"James, remember now," Sark held up an admonishing finger, "L.A is about to be turned into a pot-roast." 

James snatched up the Wand again, teeth gritted.

"Anyway," drawled Sark, "you could hardly afford to call Alison a," he stumbled with the word, "a _skank_. Is that actually a _word_ by the way? Because as I recall you were certainly taking full opportunity to grope _me_ on that bike."

"_What?"_ The Wand got slammed down again.

"Ah-ah!" reproved Sark. "Attention now, 'pot roast'!"

"G_rope _you?" she squealed, snatching up the Wand again and working with it. "You mean 'grope you' as in saving our lives with your loose change and then clinging on for dear life as we broke Mach 1? Do you mean 'grope you' as used to define the alternative to Falling Off and Getting Killed?"

Sark smoothly changed the subject. "Well, as to the Wolf-Wrestler – I mean _Sydney_ – was there anything between us?" Despite himself he felt a faint flush of … something. He wasn't sure what though. Irked? Uncomfortable at thinking abut it? He swept it aside. "No there wasn't … Well, yes there was. Once. Maybe." He shook his head, speaking briskly, "but it's all irrelevant now." He decided to gloss over it. "I mean, I did once threaten to douse her in a shower of acid, but it got no further than that."

"Doused … a_cid?_ Douse her with _acid?_"

Sark raised an eyebrow, "Focus now James, remember, the city is depending on you."

The Wand was wielded again.

"Acid dousing is your definition of a _romantic gesture? _Hell, makes me feel so much better about only getting _shot in the leg!"_

Sark slammed down the angle-grinder he'd been holding.

"Oh! God! You are going to fling that subject at me forever, aren't you? I mean, even in twenty years time the subject of that leg is going to come up, isn't it?"

"You _shot _me. And worse - you were _mean_ to me! What? - you think I can just forgive you? And stop looking all _cute!_ You think I can't _tell_ when you're doing the 'looking up at me from under your eyebrows' cute thing? You think I don't _know _you're doing it?"

Sark pushed his bottom lip out.

"Well, looking cute works. Gets me out of practically anything."

There was a silence as James concentrated angrily on disrupting the magnetic fields of the bomb by using the Wand to alter the structure of the very metals the firebomb was made of. Using Rambaldi's own toy to destroy his own weapon.

Fitting.

Sark saw that she was not going to yield.

He closed his eyes.

"Oh God … You want an apology don't you?" He took on an almost aggrieved note. "Look, I don't _do_ apologies!"

James' face still held grim determination.

"If I apologise … well it'll be like Dorothy throwing the bucket of water over the wicked witch – I'll _melt!"_

Still grim.

"You don't want to see me turned into a nasty puddle of goo in the corner, do you?"

A flashing resentment. "Don't tempt me!"

"But I … er …" Sark's voice dwindled down into a small blurred noise and then rose again in great shriek. "Oh alright … _I'm sorry!_ _Okay?_ I'M SORRY! … I'M SORRIER THAN I'VE EVER BEEN! IN FACT I'M SO SORRY, I'M THE SORRIEST BASTARD IN SORRYSHIRE! _OKAY?"_

There was a silence.

"Well there's no need to shout," she announced, "I can _hear _you."

James bubbled with a sly, unvoiced laughter. Sark's jaw moved silently with the puzzlement of a man who knows he's just been out-foxed but doesn't quite know how. He diverted himself. He pointed at the bomb, which showed as having twenty seconds to run.

"That thing actually going to be okay now?"

"Oh no, it's gonna blow up."

"_What?"_

"Well I said I could stop the burn, and I just have." She rose to her feet. "Job done. But, c'mon, I never said I could stop it from _exploding!_ I mean, what? – you think I can do _everything?_ Be _reasonable."_

Sark grabbed her, shot-out the nearest window, sprinted toward it, rappelled them from a rip-cord hidden in his belt, and hurled them out into space.

"Mom? Dad? Oh my god – _MOM!"_ Sydney started screaming as she saw the fractured human tied to the chair. Her scream went unheard outside the room as the building was raked by gunfire.

"Sydney! _Shut up!_ We haven't got time for this now!" Jack bodily picked the whole chair up, with Irina still in it. "Your mother's told me what to do! I need to get to a room five doors down. Now MOVE! If anyone stops us, SHOOT THEM!"

Sydney and Jack bounced out the room, Irina in the chair Jack carried. Sydney skipped backwards following her parents: gun in each hand, firing at any movement. She clipped one man full in the chest and watched him hurtle backwards as though he'd been jerked on a wire.

Oh God, I hope that's not one of our guys! 

She kept firing wildly.

She felt rather than saw her father and mother go into the room. She caught a glimpse inside of something that looked like medical equipment, I.V.s, bags of blood-serum … but it couldn't be blood serum because it was … _green?_

Her dad back-heeled the door shut on her with a shout of, "Keep everybody out!"

She leapt for cover in a doorway opposite, firing ferociously the length of the corridor, keeping it clear. She knew perfectly well the team of people she was single-handedly keeping pinned down, just around the corner at the far end, were CIA. She even thought one of them was Weiss.

She didn't know how long she kept it up for. Until all her ammunition ran out really.

She held her hands up as the ops team rounded the corner, guns trained.

"_Jesus Christ! - "_ Weiss' explosion filled the air. It had been him after all. He abruptly lowered his weapon, screaming 'stand down!' to the men behind him. "Jesus Syd! I nearly _shot _you! What were you _thinking?"_

"I didn't know it was you! Hey, you didn't know it was me, right? Friendly fire."

The explanation seemed to hold water.

A sound came from the room opposite Sydney. Weiss immediately swivelled toward it, gun raised.

"No! – I - " but her cry came too late, Weiss had kicked the door in.

NO! Mom! They'll jail her! 

She forced past him and barged into the room not knowing what she would do next. Force everybody out? Hold herself hostage whilst she bought time for Dad to pull his plan? _Hey, because Dad always has a plan!_

And then she didn't have to. And Weiss looked at her puzzled, vaguely suspicious as a slight smile played about her lips, vaguely suspicious because although Syd was acting suspiciously, there was nothing to be suspicious of. The room was empty, there was no-one there.

Sydney felt a jolt of shock, and gradually something else building up within her, a wild, tumultuous wave of disbelieving relief and … _happiness._

Her parents were … gone.

They fell through the air, the warm night wind in their hair, rappelling safely in a series of long controlled falls down the side of the building to the ground below. The bomb exploded high above them, carrying its debris far over their heads, flinging it to land at a distance which could not harm them.

Sark and James were safe.

They'd landed in an empty plaza. Startled by the blast, pigeons flocked into the air. Sark found himself wondering, for no particular reason he could think of, whether he had a few stray crumbs he could feed them upon their return.

Although it was unnecessary, he still held her tightly, one of his arms across her back, gripping her to him, her heartbeat thumping painfully against him, his other hand pressing her head into his shoulder. Anchoring her to him.

He was terrified. Scared that if he let go, she would never leave.

_If I just hold her like this, just stay here forever, she can't go._

Like two dancers standing too close, their feet and knees knocked as they stumbled against each other. Sark could feel his own heartbeat pounding in his chest.

_If I let go, she'll leave and never come back._

Words were blocked in his throat that nothing could have dragged out, he was afraid that if he made a sound he would startle her into jerking away from him.

There wasn't an inch gap between them, no gap at all.

And then she kissed him.

Her face moving against his neck, her lips smooth against his throat. Astounded, he felt an electric thrill and then felt as though he were floating. Her mouth slid up the long, lean curve of his throat. She had to rise slightly on tip-toe to catch the underside of his jaw, running her tongue there, nipping slightly.

In one rush of movement Sark had her up off both feet, their faces pushing and sliding together, mouths feeling for each other and then meeting. One long, mad, burning kiss. Her hand trapped in his hair. His arm wrapped tight about her, lifting her up off her feet, his other hand fiercely clutching at the back of her neck, pulling her in to him. Their bodies locked together.

She broke away, panting for breath, laughing as she spoke. "Jeez, were gonna be on police camera: _When Criminals Go Wild_." She gasped with laughter. "There's probably some poor security guy watching us now, pleading at the monitor, _oh please, get a room_."

Holding tight against each other, they shook with laughter. Sark had his eyes closed, almost crying with hilarity. "James, you are completely _mad!"_

And then her arms went round him, and he knew it was going to be alright. And she tugged at him, getting him moving. "C'mon," she laughed, "let's find that room."

They walked away into the protective dark, into the anonymity of the night.

After some minutes they had cleared the area, close together, her arm tight about his waist, his about her shoulders, pushing unnoticed through an increasing flow of people all going the other way, all called to the commotion they had left behind. She whispered up to him.

"You have got it in you, you know."

He looked down at her, puzzled.

She explained, "The capacity to change. You _can_ be a better person. _All you have to do is want to be_."

He felt something slacken within him, something that had been wound up too tight but which had finally started to relax. He whispered down into her hair. "Well, I'm going to start tomorrow. I'm going to walk in to the CIA."

She jerked to a halt.

"What? Are you NUTS?"

He sounded almost injured. "Well, I thought you'd like it. At least if I'm affiliated to the CIA, then when I meet your family you can at least say I've got a steady job."

There was a splutter of conflicting gasps and half-starts before she could get the words out. "You seriously think that the same organisation that hired that 'I speak French' screamer we left behind at the villa is gonna cut you a break?"

"James, I am eventually going to have to deal with them."

"Yeah? Well the definition of 'eventually' is 'not now'. What we are going to do instead is _think _about it."

Sark thrilled at her use of the word 'we'.

She looked up a the night sky, considering eagerly. "We're going to have a nice, long holiday … somewhere with beaches and … _Mai Tais_."

Sark winced. "Mai Tais are green. They're sugary. They have paper umbrellas in them. Wouldn't you prefer wine?"

She thought about it, face screwed up in concentration, seriously considering it. "No."

He seemed to struggle with something within himself. "But, I gave Sydney my word about releasing you to your old life tomorrow."

"Yeah? You gave her your word? Well I never gave her _mine_. And I vote: holiday. And if you're worried about _Wolfie_ we can tell her later, _when it's safe_."

Sark smirked. "Well, if you absolutely _insist_ on leaving. If you're going to _make_ me do it … Well I do have this little place on Crete … "

"I'll take it!"

Sark gasped with laughter again. She was so _easy_. So utterly free of angst.

James leant up as they went, whispering half-muffled into the hollow of his jaw. "I won't leave, you know. I'm not going to run out on you."

Sark hitched a breath, felt that thing which had slackened within him slacken further, and then find ease. Some small but vital part of him woke up, like a watch spring after years of rusted disuse and abuse which had suddenly sprung to life. He didn't know what it was … he wasn't sure … and then he identified it. He was feeling … _happy_.

He buried his face into her hair as they went, gripping her tightly, whispering back. "I'm not worried."

They picked up speed as they walked along. His arm wrapped about her, she close against his side. He felt his sureness and confidence return with every fresh step. He knew who he was. He was Sark, the man who only _pretended_ to be Mr. Sark. He spoke, chin up, smug, exuding a faint air of self-congratulation.

"Did I ever tell you that I'm descended from the Romanovs?"

The woman next to him gave a Bayou-accented drawl.

"Nope, but it explains plenty. Royalty huh? - a better class of sarcasm."

_The End._

_Author's notes:_ joke taken from Stephen Sommers' film, _Deep Rising_. A great B-movie!

_Writing on 21 March 2005._

This is the first book in a series of two or three books (depending on how many it takes to finish the story).

As a Sark fangirl I want completion on the Sark, Sydney, Sarkney, Rambaldi, Jack and Irina plotlines. As of right now, the way things are going with the TV show I think we Sark fans are going to have to provide that completion for ourselves. I'm certainly going to provide mine.

If you've read this far and are interested in more, then I'm working on Book 2 now (just started it today – they day I finished Book 1). The events in Book 2 pretty much take off from the end of Book 1 and continue the tale. There will be far more Sarkney in the next book than there was in this one, although of course there will be many rivers to cross along the way.

If you liked this book then you may have to wait a while for Book 2. Although I've started writing it, I don't publish a chapter at a time, rather I compile the whole book (as I did with this one), editing as I go, and then I publish it in one hit. It's much easier for me to write that way, and I think produces a much better read. Come on, wouldn't you prefer to have the whole box of chocolates to eat at once rather than be lead on with one stingy little chocolate at a time?

Off and on it took me 6 months to write this book – but a lot of that time was spent 'learning to write' so hopefully the next one won't take quite so long! So, if you enjoyed this book and are looking forward to Book 2, then wish me luck!

Oh, and the title of Book 2 will be - _The Man Who Was Mr. Sark: A Dark Angel_

You want spoilers for what's coming up next? Well here's just a _few_. I am completely moving away from the TV plot and will be following my own. Rambaldi will take a bow, that nasty man 'The Tutor' will be back (come on, you can guess who he is, can't you?) and just what _did_ you think was going to happen with all those children who escaped Project Christmas? You didn't think I mentioned them for _nothing,_ now did you?

_Directdial_

P.S. Oh, and I swear to you, there's going to be NO COW!


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